arXiv:2602.20972cs.CV2026-02被引 3

用大模型自动打标签,成本降为人工的千分之一,效果接近人类。

Are Multimodal Large Language Models Good Annotators for Image Tagging?

  • 通过结构化提示生成候选标签,减少后续工作量。
  • 交互式校准提升标签准确性,下游任务性能达人类90%以上。
  • 适合需要低成本大规模标注的视觉研究者使用。

图像标注是基础视觉任务,传统依赖人工标注数据集训练多标签分类器,成本高昂。尽管多模态大语言模型(MLLM)有望实现自动化标注,但其替代人工的能力仍不明确。本文分析发现,保守估计下,MLLM可将标注成本降至人工的千分之一,主要为GPU开销,远低于人力投入;其标注质量达人类的50%至80%,下游训练任务性能超90%。为此,提出TagLLM框架:第一阶段通过结构化分组提示高效生成覆盖度高的候选标签集,降低后续工作量;第二阶段通过交互式语义校准,精准修正提示中的概念,优化候选标签。大量实验表明,TagLLM显著缩小了MLLM与人工标注差距,尤其在下游训练性能上,弥补了约60%至80%的差异。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Image tagging, a fundamental vision task, traditionally relies on human-annotated datasets to train multi-label classifiers, which incurs significant labor and costs. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer promising potential to automate annotation, their capability to replace human annotators remains underexplored. This paper aims to analyze the gap between MLLM-generated and human annotations and to propose an effective solution that enables MLLM-based annotation to replace manual labeling. Our analysis of MLLM annotations reveals that, under a conservative estimate, MLLMs can reduce annotation cost to as low as one-thousandth of the human cost, mainly accounting for GPU usage, which is nearly negligible compared to manual efforts. Their annotation quality reaches about 50\% to 80\% of human performance, while achieving over 90\% performance on downstream training tasks.Motivated by these findings, we propose TagLLM, a novel framework for image tagging, which aims to narrow the gap between MLLM-generated and human annotations. TagLLM comprises two components: Candidates generation, which employs structured group-wise prompting to efficiently produce a compact candidate set that covers as many true labels as possible while reducing subsequent annotation workload; and label disambiguation, which interactively calibrates the semantic concept of categories in the prompts and effectively refines the candidate labels. Extensive experiments show that TagLLM substantially narrows the gap between MLLM-generated and human annotations, especially in downstream training performance, where it closes about 60\% to 80\% of the difference.

图像标注大模型自动化

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