{"paper":{"title":"Surprise-Guided MergeSort: Budget-Efficient Human-in-the-Loop Ranking via Adaptive Comparison Scheduling","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.AI"],"primary_cat":"cs.LG","authors_text":"Haejun Chung, Ikbeom Jang, Yujin Park","submitted_at":"2026-06-14T06:11:42Z","abstract_excerpt":"Pairwise comparison is the gold standard for subjective ranking tasks; however, exhaustive annotation requires a massive number of human comparisons ($O(n^2)$). While sorting-based methods have reduced this burden to $O(n\\log n)$, they still require expensive human judgment for every single comparison. To further improve annotation efficiency, we propose leveraging a Vision-Language Model (VLM) not as an annotator replacement, but as a \\emph{question prioritizer} to identify which comparisons genuinely require human judgment. The proposed \\textbf{Surprise-Guided MergeSort (SGS)} framework achi"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2606.15623","kind":"arxiv","version":2},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2606.15623/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}