Position: Early-Stage Quality Assurance in Annotation Pipelines Is More Cost-Effective Than Late-Stage Validation
This position paper argues that the machine learning community should prioritize early-stage quality assurance in annotation pipelines over the prevailing practice of late-stage validation. Data quality bottlenecks increasingly limit foundation model improvement, yet quality assurance research focuses almost exclusively on validation methods rather than validation timing. When validation occurs, not merely what methods are employed, fundamentally determines both error rates and annotation costs. This temporal neglect is puzzling given the well-established "shift-left" principle from software engineering, where empirical studies demonstrate 4--100x cost multipliers for defects detected in ...
| Authors | Sunil Kothari, Sumukha Sharma Thoppanahalli Chandramouli, Naman Khandelwal et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 15 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 May 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.