CollabLearn: An Uncertainty-Aware Crowd-AI Collaboration System for Cultural Heritage Damage Assessment

Cultural heritage sites are precious and fragile resources that hold significant historical, esthetic, and social values in our society. However, the increasing frequency and severity of natural and man-made disasters constantly strike the cultural heritage sites with significant damages. In this article, we focus on a cultural heritage damage assessment (CHDA) problem where the goal is to accurately locate the damaged area of a cultural heritage site using the imagery data posted on social media during a disaster event by exploring the collective strengths of both AI and human intelligence from crowdsourcing systems. Unlike other infrastructure-based solutions, social media platforms provide a more pervasive and scalable solution to acquire timely cultural heritage damage information during disaster events. Our work is motivated by the limitation of current AI solutions that fail to accurately model the complex cultural heritage damage due to the lack of essential human cultural knowledge to differentiate various damage types and identify the actual causes of the damage. Two critical technical challenges exist in solving our problem: 1) it is challenging to effectively detect the problematic cultural heritage damage estimation of AI in the absence of ground truth labels and 2) it is nontrivial to acquire accurate cultural background knowledge from the potentially unreliable crowd workers to effectively address the failure cases of AI. To address the above-mentioned challenges, we develop CollabLearn, an uncertainty-aware crowd-AI collaborative assessment system that explicitly explores the human intelligence from crowdsourcing systems to identify and fix AI failure cases and boost the damage assessment accuracy in CHDA applications. The evaluation results on real-world datasets show that CollabLearn consistently outperforms both the state-of-the-art AI-only and crowd-AI hybrid baselines in accurately assessing the damage of several world-renowned cultural heritage sites in recent disaster events.