Subjective data annotation (SDA) plays an important role in many NLP tasks, including sentiment analysis, toxicity detection, and bias identification. Conventional SDA often treats annotator disagreement as noise, overlooking its potential to reveal deeper insights. In contrast, qualitative data analysis (QDA) explicitly engages with diverse positionalities and treats disagreement as a meaningful source of knowledge. In this position paper, we argue that human annotators are a key source of valuable interpretive insights into subjective data beyond surface-level descriptions. Through a comparative analysis of SDA and QDA methodologies, we examine similarities and differences in task nature (e.g., human’s role, analysis content, cost, and completion conditions) and practice (annotation schema, annotation workflow, annotator selection, and evaluation). Based on this comparison, we propose five practical recommendations for enabling SDA to capture richer insights. We demonstrate these recommendations in a reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) case study and envision that our interdisciplinary perspective will offer new directions for the field.

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has become the standard for cross- modal image-text representation learning. Improving CLIP typically requires additional data and retraining with new loss functions, but these demands raise resource and time costs, limiting practical use. In this work, we introduce HELIP, a cost-effective strategy that improves CLIP models by exploiting challenging text-image pairs within existing datasets in continuous training. This eliminates the need for additional data or extensive retraining. Moreover, HELIP integrates effortlessly into current training pipelines with minimal code modifications, allowing for quick and seamless implementation. On comprehensive benchmarks, HELIP consistently boosts existing models. In particular, within just two epochs of training, it improves zero-shot classification accuracy on ImageNet for SLIP models pre-trained on CC3M, CC12M, and YFCC15M datasets by 3.05%, 4.47%, and 10.1% , respectively. In addition, on fine-grained classification datasets, HELIP improves the zero-shot performance of CLIP and SLIP by an average of 8.4% and 18.6%, and their linear probe performance by an average of 9.5% and 3.0%.