The explosive growth of short videos has presented significant challenges to content governance. Traditional manual labeling is inefficient, slow to iterate, and costly. Therefore, we explore and develop a multi-stage autopilot labeling framework aimed at progressively increasing the level of automation in short video content annotation. To move beyond the heavy reliance on human expert labeling at the initial L0 stage, we first introduce a discriminative MLLM labeler at the L1 stage, which is fine-tuned with supervised data to directly predict labels for short videos. Advancing to the L2 stage, we shift to a domain-adaptive MLLM pretrained on short video data and use it for zero-shot labeling, enabling flexible generalization without task-specific supervision. In the L3 stage, we propose an agentic annotation workflow, and equip the agent with several key tools, which empower the agent to handle complex, unfamiliar, or vaguely defined cases, significantly reducing the need for human intervention. We conduct extensive experiments across various content issues, and results demonstrate that each stage of the autopilot labeling framework progressively improves labeling accuracy, and has significantly reduced manual labor costs in real-world applications by up to 85%.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Illustration of our multi-stage autopilot labeling framework for short video content governance. indicates a longer processing time, while indicates a shorter processing time.
Labeling Model
SSC
PQC
CB
Acc
P
R
F1
Acc
P
R
F1
Acc
P
R
F1
Discriminative MLLM labeler (L1)
71.0
91.8
47.0
62.2
93.9
97.4
89.6
93.4
65.6
59.3
69.9
64.1
Generative MLLM labeler (L2)
Zero-shot
60.2
96.5
22.1
36.0
79.1
86.5
70.0
75.5
73.2
70.8
57.6
63.5
+ Annotation guidelines decomposition
71.3
91.8
47.5
62.6
83.3
85.6
78.5
81.9
72.2
63.6
72.8
67.9
Agentic Labeler (L3)
Table 1: Result of all labeling models. The evaluation metrics are Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F1 score (in %). The highest value in each column is shown in bold , and the second-highest is underlined .
Type of reduction
SSC
CB
IPC
Human labor reduction
27%
52%
85%
Monetary cost reduction
w/ commercial MLLMs
13–18%
25–34%
42–56%
w/ locally deployed MLLMs
25%
48%
79%
Table 2: Human labor reduction and monetary cost reduction after introducing MLLM labeler.
Figure 2: Impact of the number of examples on agent’s performance.
Figure 3: The two implementations of the zoom-in tool.
Zoom-in tool
Acc
P
R
F1
No zoom-in
78.3
86.2
68.2
76.1
Bounding box generation
77.8
87.7
65.4
74.9
Visual grid selection
79.0
88.2
67.5
76.5
Table 3: Comparison of zoom-in tools on the SSC issue. The highest value in each column is shown in bold .
Figure 4: Success case analysis.
Appendix figures & tables5 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 5: The work flows of manual labeling.
Figure 6: The work flows of MLLM-assisted labeling.
Figure 7: Discriminative MLLM’s labeling performance on the SSC issue with varying amounts of training data.
Figure 8: The correlation between the proportion of MLLM-labeled videos and the overall annotation quality for SSC (See Section 4.2 for details). The optimal point indicates that up to 38.2% of human labor can be saved theoretically.
Model
SSC
CB
IPC
Content governance model
30.5
57.4
43.7
Discriminative MLLM labeler
33.2
65.3
47.4
Appendix
Table 4: Comparison between content governance models and discriminative MLLM labeler. The evaluation metric is R@P50 (Recall at 50% Precision) (in %). The highest value in each column is shown in bold .
Many automated labeling pipelines classify inputs into categories defined by a written specification, content moderation being a prominent use case. Simple category definitions are not detailed enough for labelers to produce the accurate, consistent golden labels these pipelines require. One solution is to write a prescriptive definition that settles enough real boundary cases that labelers cannot disagree with the written interpretation. In practice, definitions at that level of detail exceed what a human annotator can hold in working memory, so annotators fall back on intuition and the labels drift from the written rules, regressing on accuracy and consistency. We propose and demonstrate the efficacy of an AI-driven workflow in which AI helps write a per-category constitution that defines the label in enough detail to cover edge cases, and a frontier LLM interprets it on each input to produce the golden label more consistently and accurately than humans reading the same document. We evaluate on three content moderation categories (harassment, hate speech, non-violent crime) and show that the approach reduces cross-model inconsistency by up to 57x compared to paragraph definitions, with cross-model disagreement diagnosing specification gaps and the human responsible for high-level decisions about what each category should mean rather than individual labeling calls. For the safety evaluation, we introduce a dual-axis formulation scoring intent and content independently over the full conversation, so downstream consumers can act on either axis or both.
This paper proposes a Short-Window Sliding Learning framework for real-time violence detection in CCTV footages. Unlike conventional long-video training approaches, the proposed method divides videos into 1-2 second clips and applies Large Language Model (LLM)-based auto-caption labeling to construct fine-grained datasets. Each short clip fully utilizes all frames to preserve temporal continuity, enabling precise recognition of rapid violent events. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 95.25% accuracy on RWF-2000 and significantly improves performance on long videos (UCF-Crime: 83.25%), confirming its strong generalization and real-time applicability in intelligent surveillance systems.
High-quality labeled data is critical for training reliable machine learning and deep learning models, yet manual annotation remains costly and error-prone. Programmatic labeling addresses this challenge by using label functions (LFs), i.e., heuristic rules that automatically generate weak labels for training datasets. However, existing automated LF generation methods either rely on large language models (LLMs) to synthesize surface-level heuristics or employ model-based synthesis over hand-crafted primitives. These approaches often result in limited coverage and unreliable label quality. In this paper, we introduce EXPONA, an automated framework for programmatic labeling that formulates LF generation as a principled process balancing diversity and reliability. EXPONA systematically explores multi-level LFs, spanning surface, structural, and semantic perspectives. EXPONA further applies reliability-aware mechanisms to suppress noisy or redundant heuristics while preserving complementary signals. To evaluate EXPONA, we conducted extensive experiments on eleven classification datasets across diverse domains. Experimental results show that EXPONA consistently outperformed state-of-the-art automated LF generation methods. Specifically, EXPONA achieved nearly complete label coverage (up to 98.9%), improved weak label quality by up to 87%, and yielded downstream performance gains of up to 46% in weighted F1. These results indicate that EXPONA's combination of multi-level LF exploration and reliability-aware filtering enabled more consistent label quality and downstream performance across diverse tasks by balancing coverage and precision in the generated LF set.
Phong Lam, Ha-Linh Nguyen, Thu-Trang Nguyen +2
Faculty of Information Technology, VNU University of Engineering and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam