REVIEW 4 major objections 5 minor 34 references
Showing a language model a handful of an annotator's past labels lets it predict that annotator's future labels, and pooling those predictions produces competitive soft labels.
Reviewed by Pith at T0; open to challenge. T0 means a machine referee read the full paper against a public rubric. the ladder, T0–T4 →
2026-08-04 18:53 UTC pith:ZFCIYYGS
load-bearing objection Solid shared-task paper with an underdetermined ICL claim—missing the obvious no-personalization control—but an honest, useful look at LDL for perspectivist NLP. the 4 major comments →
DeMeVa at LeWiDi-2025: Modeling Perspectives with In-Context Learning and Label Distribution Learning
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
Core claim
The central discovery is that a pretrained language model, with no task-specific fine-tuning, can act as a proxy for a specific annotator if it is shown a small sample of that annotator's past labels. For each test item, the system retrieves ten demonstrations from the annotator's training annotations—either by semantic similarity with redundancy penalty or by stratified sampling over the annotator's label distribution—and prompts the model to 'guess my response.' The predicted labels are then averaged across annotators to form a soft label distribution. The paper reports that this two-step procedure beats simple baselines on all four datasets and matches or exceeds fine-tuned approaches on
What carries the argument
The key mechanism is demonstration selection inside an in-context-learning prompt. For each annotator and each test input, the pipeline builds a prompt from ten of that annotator's past annotations using one of two sampling strategies: similarity-based retrieval with maximal marginal relevance, or stratified label-based sampling that preserves the annotator's empirical label proportions. The prompt asks the model to infer the annotator's response; these per-annotator predictions are then aggregated by averaging into a soft label. The fine-tuning strand relies on the identity that the cumulative absolute distance (CAD) between two discrete distributions equals the one-dimensional Wasserstein
Load-bearing premise
The pipeline assumes that ten past labels from an annotator are enough for a language model to learn and generalize that annotator's decision heuristics to new items; the paper's own qualitative analysis shows models often fall back to unanimous, common-sense predictions on contentious items, so this assumption can fail.
What would settle it
On a held-out set of items where annotators disagree, take an annotator whose labels are idiosyncratic (e.g., predominantly using a middle scale value), give the model ten of their labels, and check whether its predictions on the remaining items beat a majority-vote baseline for that annotator; if it does not for several such annotators, the claim that ICL captures individual perspectives fails.
If this is right
- Per-annotator modeling becomes feasible without training a separate model: any sampler that can find past examples for an annotator can produce that annotator's likely labels on new items.
- Label-stratified sampling improves calibration of numeric predictions (e.g., Likert-scale values) more than similarity-based sampling, and the benefit grows when annotator explanations are included in the prompt.
- Including explanations in prompts improves the derived soft labels (Task A) more than the per-annotator error rate (Task B), suggesting the explanations mainly calibrate the distribution shape.
- Using cumulative absolute distance as a loss function for Likert-scale prediction is principled because it equals the 1D Wasserstein distance used in evaluation, and it yields scores competitive with in-context learning on the sarcasm dataset.
- Clustering items into groups with similar label distributions and training a multitask model to predict both the soft label and the cluster can outperform baselines, but underperforms the ICL pipeline, pointing to headroom for LDL methods.
Where Pith is reading between the lines
- A natural extension is to reduce annotation cost: have each annotator label only a small personal training set and use ICL to impute their labels for the rest of a corpus, effectively multiplying each annotator's coverage.
- The observed failure mode—models defaulting to unanimous, common-sense labels on items where annotators disagree—suggests alignment-induced priors may suppress pluralism; explicitly prompting with disagreement examples or tuning decoding temperature could be a direct test.
- Because CAD equals 1D Wasserstein, any NLP task with ordinal labels evaluated by distribution distance can adopt CAD as a loss; this bridges the train/eval gap for Likert-scale soft-label prediction beyond the two datasets studied.
- A concrete next experiment would vary k (the number of demonstrations) to map how quickly per-annotator accuracy saturates, and to test whether annotators with skewed label distributions need more (or fewer) examples than k=10.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper describes the DeMeVa team's submission to the LeWiDi 2025 shared task. For Task B (perspectivist prediction) and Task A (soft-label prediction), the authors propose a two-step ICL pipeline: first, GPT-4o, Claude Haiku 3.5, or Llama 3.1 70B are prompted with k=10 demonstrations sampled from an individual annotator's past labels; second, the predicted labels are aggregated into soft labels. Two sampling strategies are compared (similarity-based MMR and stratified label-based), and the effect of including annotator explanations is tested on Par and VariErrNLI. The authors also fine-tune RoBERTa using ordinal label distribution losses (cumulative Jensen-Shannon divergence, cumulative absolute distance) and a clustering-based multitask approach, reporting Wasserstein distances. The paper claims that ICL can effectively predict annotator-specific annotations and that LDL methods are promising; the team ranked 2nd on the shared task leaderboard.
Significance. If the central ICL claim were fully established, the paper would be a useful contribution to perspectivist NLP: it would show that a small number of annotator-specific demonstrations can steer LLMs toward individual labeling behavior, and that aggregating such predictions yields competitive soft labels. The paper also helpfully connects ordinal LDL losses to the 1D Wasserstein distance, and it is transparent about negative results and failure modes. The shared-task leaderboard rank provides external validation of the pipeline's overall utility. However, the central claim is underdetermined by the reported experiments: the design lacks the crucial control of conditioning on non-annotator-specific demonstrations, and the ICL results have no error bars or significance tests. The qualitative analysis in Section 3.4 partly undermines rather than supports the claim, and the authors themselves concede in Section 5 that the ICL comparison is 'not yielding fully conclusive results.'
major comments (4)
- [Section 3.3, Table 2] The central contribution 'ICL can effectively predict annotator-specific annotations' is not supported because the experiments never include a zero-shot condition or a condition in which demonstrations are taken from other annotators or pooled across annotators. The prompt in Fig. 2 instructs the model to learn 'my response behavior' from 'my previous responses,' but without a non-personalized control the observed gains over the majority baseline could be due to GPT-4o's general language understanding or to the label-range cue in the prompt, rather than to perspectivist learning. Section 3.4's observation that models default to unanimous/common-sense labels on ambiguous items is exactly what a non-personalized model would do. Add at least a zero-shot baseline and a condition with demonstrations sampled from annotators other than the target annotator; report these alongside Table 2.
- [Section 3.3, Table 2] All ICL results appear to come from a single run at temperature 0.0. The differences between sampling strategies are often tiny (e.g., GPT-4o+sim vs GPT-4o+strat on MP Task A: 0.466 vs 0.469; on CSC Task A: 0.84 vs 0.792), and there are no standard deviations, confidence intervals, or significance tests. The paper draws qualitative conclusions (e.g., 'label-based sampling often results in improvements on Task A') from differences that may be within run-to-run noise. Report repeated runs with variance estimates, and where possible perform paired significance tests across items.
- [Section 3.4] The claim that 'models are generally successful in mimicking specific annotators' labeling strategies' rests on a single anecdotal example (Ann3 in Par) and a qualitative description of VariErrNLI. This is not sufficient to support the central claim. Provide quantitative per-annotator metrics: for each annotator, compare predicted labels against that annotator's held-out labels, and compare against a zero-shot or pooled-demonstration baseline. Also quantify the frequency of the 'common-sense default' failure mode described for MP-dev-1597. The paper's own statement that 'complete pluralistic alignment ... may be impossible' is compatible with the alternative explanation that the model is not learning annotator-specific behavior at all.
- [Section 4.1, Table 3] The fine-tuning claim that CAD/CAD+MAE 'can yield scores that are competitive with in-context learning' (0.797 vs 0.792 on CSC) is based on means without significance tests. The stated standard deviations (±0.01) suggest the difference is within noise. Since the paper's second contribution is a call for greater use of LDL methods, this comparison needs at least a variance estimate and, ideally, a statistical test or a statement that the difference is not significant.
minor comments (5)
- [Section 3.2] The definition 'L = max{|Y_a|, k}' is confusing when k is fixed at 10 and |Y_a| is usually smaller than 10; in that case the condition |D_a| ≤ L is simply |D_a| ≤ 10. Clarify the intended role of L, especially if the goal is to decide when stratification is feasible.
- [Section 3.4] The phrase 'possibly induced by RLHF' is speculative. The common-sense defaulting behavior could have many causes; consider rewording as a hypothesis rather than an explanation.
- [Section 2.1, Table 1] The Par dataset is described as 'as yet unpublished'; if a preprint or companion description exists, adding a citation would help readers locate the data.
- [Section 3.3] The explanation for MP results says 'the error rate is not significantly influenced' but no significance test is reported; rephrase to 'not substantially different' or add the test.
- [Section 4.2] The choice of k-means with 'a maximum of 5 clusters' and the tuning of α are not justified beyond a brief mention. A sentence on how these were selected (e.g., grid search on dev) would improve reproducibility.
Circularity Check
No significant circularity: the ICL predictions and LDL training are independent of the reported evaluation targets.
full rationale
The paper's central claims are empirical results from prompting LLMs with held-out training demonstrations and from fine-tuning RoBERTa with defined loss functions, both evaluated on separate test sets. No step reduces to its own input by construction: the ICL predictions are produced by the LLM given k=10 annotator-specific demonstrations and are not fitted to the test labels; the soft labels are aggregates of these independent predictions; and the LDL losses (CJS, CAD) are defined from first principles and used as training objectives, with the observation that CAD coincides with the 1D Wasserstein metric being a mathematical equivalence rather than a circular argument. The paper contains no load-bearing self-citations, and the acknowledged limitation that models often default to common-sense labels on ambiguous items is an empirical weakness (and the absence of a zero-shot control is a missing baseline), not circular reasoning. The derivation chain is therefore self-contained with respect to the evaluation.
Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger
free parameters (5)
- k (number of demonstrations) =
10
- lambda (MMR diversity weight) =
0.7
- number of clusters (k-means on Par) =
3 (best)
- alpha (cluster loss weight) =
tunable
- temperature =
0.0
axioms (3)
- domain assumption An LLM can infer an individual annotator's labeling policy from a small number of in-context examples.
- domain assumption Cosine similarity of sentence embeddings captures the kind of similarity relevant to annotation behavior.
- domain assumption The empirical label distribution from four or five annotators is a reliable target for soft label evaluation.
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of DeMeVa at LeWiDi-2025: Modeling Perspectives with In-Context Learning and Label Distribution Learning." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/ZFCIYYGS
@misc{pith2026250909524,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: DeMeVa at LeWiDi-2025: Modeling Perspectives with In-Context Learning and Label Distribution Learning},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/ZFCIYYGS}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2509.09524}
}
read the original abstract
This system paper presents the DeMeVa team's approaches to the third edition of the Learning with Disagreements shared task (LeWiDi 2025; Leonardelli et al., 2025). We explore two directions: in-context learning (ICL) with large language models, where we compare example sampling strategies; and label distribution learning (LDL) methods with RoBERTa (Liu et al., 2019b), where we evaluate several fine-tuning methods. Our contributions are twofold: (1) we show that ICL can effectively predict annotator-specific annotations (perspectivist annotations), and that aggregating these predictions into soft labels yields competitive performance; and (2) we argue that LDL methods are promising for soft label predictions and merit further exploration by the perspectivist community.
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This paper was first reviewed by deepseek-v4-flash on August 4, 2026.
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