In-house, outsourced, or the best of both? A guide to sourcing people for RLHF

So, you’ve decided to use reinforcement learning through human feedback (RLHF) to train or refine your AI model. Fantastic choice.

Now you’ll need to source human feedback to fuel your training projects. Three common options for this are:

• Build an in-house team of either employees or contractors
• Use a crowdsourcing platform
• Use a mix of both

There are pros and cons to each method that you’ll want to bear in mind before moving forward.
 

Using internal teams: the plus points

Domain expertise

Internal teams are made up of hand-picked experts with knowledge in a specific domain. This can be particularly helpful when training your model to understand nuances that non-experts might need help to grasp.

Consistency and standardization

Giving guidance on tasks to annotators is easier with an internal team. With fewer barriers to communication, support and onboarding is simpler to manage.

Confidentiality and security

Ensuring data stays secure can pose challenges when you have to share it with third parties. Especially if it's sensitive customer data.

Using an internal team minimizes this risk. You retain control over the data's destination. And you're not bound by the protocols of an external party. You have the flexibility to establish agreements within your team.

Using internal teams: the downsides

Resource allocation

Using an internal team has its advantages. But setting one up can be an arduous process. It can take significant time and resources to train, source, and retain contributors.

Scalability

Adapting internal teams to evolving project roadmaps can pose challenges. Especially if you need to scale annotations up or down, or work on projects outside the team's domain expertise.

Turnaround time

Internal annotation teams may be unable to complete tasks as quickly as you’d like.

If you’ve got a tight deadline to hit or a time-sensitive project, managing this can be tricky if people are already tied up with other tasks.

Training and retention

Training internal annotation teams can take a lot of resources. But this investment can be short-lived as annotators transition out. This leads to an endless cycle, where you have to replace contributors and shoulder the burden of rapidly training new team members.
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Crowdsourcing trainers: the plus points

Speed of deployment

To quickly generate a vast amount of training data, you'll sometimes need to adopt a scalable method for collecting human feedback. Crowdsourcing can help by providing a wider pool of people that you can deploy rapidly.

Cost-effectiveness

Crowdsourcing presents a cost-effective alternative for gathering human feedback. Particularly when compared to the costs associated with maintaining an internal team. You can scale human feedback up or down to ensure that project costs are aligned.

Diversity and expertise

With crowdsourcing, you can tap into a wider range of demographics and backgrounds, which includes both experts and non-experts.

Having a diverse contributor base means you can incorporate the collective wisdom and insights of the crowd into your feedback loop. This helps to reduce bias and enables models to develop a more well-rounded perspective of the real world.

Quick turnaround times

As the race to innovate in the AI market intensifies, you need to deploy models quickly. This puts pressure on data teams to iterate faster.

Crowdsourcing can be a valuable tool to speed up the iterative process. Particularly when you need to enrich large volumes of data at each training stage.

This lets you iterate and experiment with models faster.

Flexibility and adaptability

With crowdsourcing, it's easy to adjust the level of human input you need. This lets developers scale their resources in line with the changing demands of an agile project roadmap.

Crowdsourcing trainers: the downsides

Communication and coordination

Standard crowdsourcing platforms often don't have efficient features for communication. This can make it difficult to interact with large numbers of contributors. This makes it harder to give clear instructions and ongoing guidance for tasks, which might have a negative effect on the quality of the data you get.

Longer processes

Depending on the complexity of your tasks and the number of participants involved, it may take a while for you to coordinate completion, aggregate responses, and process data. This might have a knock-on effect on your project timelines.

Privacy and security concerns

Making sure data stays secure can pose challenges when you crowdsource. Especially if it's sensitive customer data.

There are methods in place to mitigate these risks. But the level of adherence to data privacy measures largely relies on the platform's terms of service.

Task complexity limitations

You might have an intricate assignment that requires people with previous expertise or a specific skill set and technical know-how.

Standard crowdsourcing platforms may not have the precise contributors you need for a project. And filtering for experienced or expert contributors, who might be critical for some projects, can mean having to pay extra costs.

Limited control over participant availability

Crowd workers use platforms voluntarily. There's no guarantee they'll be available.

This lack of control could delay projects. So, it's crucial to choose a platform that has a substantial pool of relevant contributors to offset attrition.

Enjoy the best of both worlds with Prolific

After looking at both approaches' advantages and disadvantages, you might ask yourself - how do I strike a balance and get the best of both worlds?

Prolific offers a hybrid approach to sourcing human input for a range of human-in-the-loop (HITL) tasks. This includes data annotation, data labeling, computer vision, and much more.

Here’s how:

Data quality

Prolific has a rigorous vetting process for every participant in our pool. This goes beyond just joining the platform. We verify Photo IDs and continuously assess trust scores. So, you only engage with people who consistently produce accurate and high-quality work.

Communication

Prolific has a messaging API that makes communicating with participants simple. You can engage with them directly, whether individually or in bulk. This simplifies the process of conveying task instructions and onboarding groups for projects.

Speed

Whether you've crowdsourced or used internal teams in the past, you'll be pleasantly surprised by just how quick it is to collect data with Prolific. On average it takes just three hours to collect a complete data set. This is mainly due to the abundant supply of enthusiastic participants who are actively engaged on the platform.

Diversity

Prolific's pool of participants is extremely diverse and is made up of people from all over the globe. You can find participants with specific backgrounds really easily by using a selection of over 250 free filters. These filters let you identify participants based on their demographic, first language, areas of expertise, and much more.

Scalability

Prolific is flexible and lets you rapidly expand how much human feedback you can gather. When choosing participants, you'll only come across contributors who are actively involved on the platform. This ensures you can confidently recruit enough people to meet your project needs. Also, you can rest easy knowing that the participants you recruit are dependable. They won't bring any malicious individuals or bots into your feedback loop.

Ethics

We uphold the utmost ethical standards in how we treat our participants and make sure they receive fair compensation. This not only helps us retain fantastic talent for HITL tasks but also ensures that your progress aligns with ethical guidelines. This point will become more significant as regulations get stricter.

If you need easy access to a wide variety of participants for tasks that involve human input, plus the right mechanisms to ensure supervision and high data quality that will make your project a success, Prolific can help. With our platform, you can gather reliable data at any volume you require.

Visit our AI page to learn more about how Prolific can support your next project – no compromises to consider.

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