Soft-Label Training Preserves Epistemic Uncertainty

Many machine learning tasks involve inherent subjectivity, where annotators naturally provide varied labels. Standard practice collapses these label distributions into single labels, aggregating diverse human judgments into point estimates. We argue that this approach is epistemically misaligned for ambiguous data--the annotation distribution itself should be regarded as the ground truth. Training on collapsed single labels forces models to express false confidence on fundamentally ambiguous cases, creating a misalignment between model certainty and the diversity of human perception. We demonstrate empirically that soft-label training, which treats annotation distributions as ground truth, preserves epistemic uncertainty. Across both vision and NLP tasks, soft-label training achieves 32% lower KL divergence from human annotations and 61% stronger correlation between model and annotation entropy, while matching the accuracy of hard-label training. Our work repositions annotation distributions from noisy signals to be aggregated away, to faithful representations of epistemic uncertainty that models should learn to reproduce.

Poze: Sports Technique Feedback under Data Constraints

Access to expert coaching is essential for developing technique in sports, yet economic barriers often place it out of reach for many enthusiasts. To bridge this gap, we introduce Poze, an innovative video processing framework that provides feedback on human motion, emulating the insights of a professional coach. Poze combines pose estimation with sequence comparison and is optimized to function effectively with minimal data. Poze surpasses state-of-the-art vision-language models in video question-answering frameworks, achieving 70% and 196% increase in accuracy over GPT4V and LLaVAv1.6 7b, respectively.