# Learning Who Disagrees: Demographic Importance Weighting for Modeling Annotator Distributions with DiADEM

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08425 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08425/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [From Generation to Judgment: Opportunities and Challenges of LLM-as-a-judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16594/) (2024)
- [Dealing with Disagreements: Looking Beyond the Majority Vote in Subjective Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05719/) (2021)
- [Are We Modeling the Task or the Annotator? An Investigation of Annotator Bias in Natural Language Understanding Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07898/) (2019)
- [The 'Problem' of Human Label Variation: On Ground Truth in Data, Modeling and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02570/) (2022)
- [On Releasing Annotator-Level Labels and Information in Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05699/) (2021)
- [Label Distribution Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.6027/) (2014)
- [Jury Learning: Integrating Dissenting Voices into Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02950/) (2022)
- [Deep learning from crowds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01779/) (2017)
- [DICES Dataset: Diversity in Conversational AI Evaluation for Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11247/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Learning for Cold-Start Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.05315/) (2021)
- [The Alternative Annotator Test for LLM-as-a-Judge: How to Statistically Justify Replacing Human Annotators with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10970/) (2025)
- [Agreeing to Disagree: Annotating Offensive Language Datasets with Annotators' Disagreement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13563/) (2021)
- [No Free Labels: Limitations of LLM-as-a-Judge Without Human Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05061/) (2025)
- [Whose Ground Truth? Accounting for Individual and Collective Identities Underlying Dataset Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04554/) (2021)
- [Everyone's Voice Matters: Quantifying Annotation Disagreement Using Demographic Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05036/) (2023)
- [SemEval-2023 Task 11: Learning With Disagreements (LeWiDi)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14803/) (2023)
- [When Do Annotator Demographics Matter? Measuring the Influence of Annotator Demographics with the POPQUORN Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06826/) (2023)
- [You Are What You Annotate: Towards Better Models through Annotator Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14663/) (2023)
- [The Perspectivist Paradigm Shift: Assumptions and Challenges of Capturing Human Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05860/) (2024)
- [Detecting Cross-Geographic Biases in Toxicity Modeling on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06999/) (2021)
- [Capturing Perspectives of Crowdsourced Annotators in Subjective Learning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09743/) (2023)
- [Value Profiles for Encoding Human Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15484/) (2025)
- [Disentangling Perceptions of Offensiveness: Cultural and Moral Correlates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06861/) (2023)
- [ACTOR: Active Learning with Annotator-specific Classification Heads to Embrace Human Label Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14979/) (2023)
- [Vicarious Offense and Noise Audit of Offensive Speech Classifiers: Unifying Human and Machine Disagreement on What is Offensive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12534/) (2023)
- [GRASP: A Disagreement Analysis Framework to Assess Group Associations in Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05074/) (2023)
- [Beyond Consensus: Perspectivist Modeling and Evaluation of Annotator Disagreement in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09065/) (2026)
- [Hate Speech Classifiers Learn Human-Like Social Stereotypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14839/) (2021)
- [Whose View of Safety? A Deep DIVE Dataset for Pluralistic Alignment of Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13383/) (2025)
- [Don't Blame the Data, Blame the Model: Understanding Noise and Bias When Learning from Subjective Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04085/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

When humans label subjective content, they disagree, and that disagreement is not noise. It reflects genuine differences in perspective shaped by annotators' social identities and lived experiences. Yet standard practice still flattens these judgments into a single majority label, and recent LLM-based approaches fare no better: we show that prompted large language models, even with chain-of-thought reasoning, fail to recover the structure of human disagreement. We introduce DiADEM, a neural architecture that learns "how much each demographic axis matters" for predicting who will disagree and on what. DiADEM encodes annotators through per-demographic projections governed by a learned importance vector boldsymbolα, fuses annotator and item representations via complementary concatenation and Hadamard interactions, and is trained with a novel item-level disagreement loss that directly penalizes mispredicted annotation variance. On the DICES conversational-safety and VOICED political-offense benchmarks, DiADEM substantially outperforms both the LLM-as-a-judge and neural model baselines across standard and perspectivist metrics, achieving strong disagreement tracking (r=0.75 on DICES). The learned boldsymbolα weights reveal that race and age consistently emerge as the most influential demographic factors driving annotator disagreement across both datasets. Our results demonstrate that explicitly modeling who annotators are not just what they label is essential for NLP systems that aim to faithfully represent human interpretive diversity.