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arXiv · 2605.18648

An Assessment of Human vs. Model Uncertainty in Soft-Label Learning and Calibration

Maja Pavlovic·Silviu Paun·Massimo Poesio
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Abstract

Central to human-aligned AI is understanding the benefits of human-elicited labels over synthetic alternatives. While human soft-labels improve calibration by capturing uncertainty, prior studies conflate these benefits with the implicit correction of mislabeled data (mode shifts), obscuring true effects of soft-labels. We present a controlled audit of soft-label learning across MNIST and a synthetic variant, re-annotating subsets to extract human uncertainty. By decoupling soft-label supervision from underlying label mode shifts, we show that while human soft-labels do provide accuracy gains, their larger value lies in acting as a regularizer that improves model calibration on difficult samples and promotes stable convergence across training runs. Dataset cartography reveals models trained on human soft-labels mirror human uncertainty, whereas those trained on synthetic labels fail to align with humans. Broadly, this work provides a diagnostic testbed for human-AI uncertainty alignment.

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Maja Pavlovic, Silviu Paun, Massimo Poesio. 2026-05-18. An Assessment of Human vs. Model Uncertainty in Soft-Label Learning and Calibration. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18648

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