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arXiv · 2602.18518

Measuring the Prevalence of Policy Violating Content with ML Assisted Sampling and LLM Labeling

Attila Dobi·Aravindh Manickavasagam·Benjamin Thompson·Xiaohan Yang·Faisal Farooq
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Abstract

Content safety teams need metrics that reflect what users actually experience, not only what is reported. We study prevalence: the fraction of user views (impressions) that went to content violating a given policy on a given day. Accurate prevalence measurement is challenging because violations are often rare and human labeling is costly, making frequent, platform-representative studies slow. We present a design-based measurement system that (i) draws daily probability samples from the impression stream using ML-assisted weights to concentrate label budget on high-exposure and high-risk content while preserving unbiasedness, (ii) labels sampled items with a multimodal LLM governed by policy prompts and gold-set validation, and (iii) produces design-consistent prevalence estimates with confidence intervals and dashboard drilldowns. A key design goal is one global sample with many pivots: the same daily sample supports prevalence by surface, viewer geography, content age, and other segments through post-stratified estimation. We describe the statistical estimators, variance and confidence interval construction, label-quality monitoring, and an engineering workflow that makes the system configurable across policies.

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Attila Dobi, Aravindh Manickavasagam, Benjamin Thompson, Xiaohan Yang, Faisal Farooq. 2026-02-19. Measuring the Prevalence of Policy Violating Content with ML Assisted Sampling and LLM Labeling. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18518

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