Modeling Collaborator: Enabling Subjective Vision Classification With Minimal Human Effort via LLM Tool-Use
Authors: Imad Eddine Toubal, Aditya Avinash, Neil Gordon Alldrin, Jan Dlabal, Wenlei Zhou, Enming Luo, Otilia Stretcu, Hao Xiong, Chun-Ta Lu, Howard Zhou, Ranjay Krishna, Ariel Fuxman, Tom Duerig

From content moderation to wildlife conservation the number of applications that require models to recognize nuanced or subjective visual concepts is growing. Traditionally developing classifiers for such concepts requires substantial manual effort measured in hours days or even months to identify and annotate data needed for training. Even with recently proposed Agile Modeling techniques which enable rapid bootstrapping of image classifiers users are still required to spend 30 minutes or more of monotonous repetitive data labeling just to train a single classifier. Drawing on Fiske's Cognitive Miser theory we propose a new framework that alleviates manual effort by replacing human labeling with natural language interactions reducing the total effort required to define a concept by an order of magnitude: from labeling 2000 images to only 100 plus some natural language interactions. Our framework leverages recent advances in foundation models both large language models and vision-language models to carve out the concept space through conversation and by automatically labeling training data points. Most importantly our framework eliminates the need for crowd-sourced annotations. Moreover our framework ultimately produces lightweight classification models that are deployable in cost-sensitive scenarios. Across 15 subjective concepts and across 2 public image classification datasets our trained models outperform traditional Agile Modeling as well as state-of-the-art zero-shot classification models like ALIGN CLIP CuPL and large visual question answering models like PaLI-X.