English

L2CU: Learning to Complement Unseen Users

Machine Learning 2026-01-13 v1 Artificial Intelligence Human-Computer Interaction

Abstract

Recent research highlights the potential of machine learning models to learn to complement (L2C) human strengths; however, generalizing this capability to unseen users remains a significant challenge. Existing L2C methods oversimplify interaction between human and AI by relying on a single, global user model that neglects individual user variability, leading to suboptimal cooperative performance. Addressing this, we introduce L2CU, a novel L2C framework for human-AI cooperative classification with unseen users. Given sparse and noisy user annotations, L2CU identifies representative annotator profiles capturing distinct labeling patterns. By matching unseen users to these profiles, L2CU leverages profile-specific models to complement the user and achieve superior joint accuracy. We evaluate L2CU on datasets (CIFAR-10N, CIFAR-10H, Fashion-MNIST-H, Chaoyang and AgNews), demonstrating its effectiveness as a model-agnostic solution for improving human-AI cooperative classification.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.06119,
  title  = {L2CU: Learning to Complement Unseen Users},
  author = {Dileepa Pitawela and Gustavo Carneiro and Hsiang-Ting Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.06119},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Published in IEEE Access (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11314492)

R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:58:14.189Z