Beyond Hard Labels: Investigating data label distributions

Abstract: High-quality data is a key aspect of modern machine learning. However, labels generated by humans suffer from issues like label noise and class ambiguities. We raise the question of whether hard labels are sufficient to represent the underlying ground truth distribution in the presence of these inherent imprecision. Therefore, we compare the disparity of learning with hard and soft labels quantitatively and qualitatively for a synthetic and a real-world dataset. We show that the application of soft labels leads to improved performance and yields a more regular structure of the internal feature space.