Ran into almost the exact same wall with an intake classifier last year. The thing that finally broke the cycle for me was treating "Other" as a signal instead of a category — when confidence was low I routed it through a second pass that had the model summarize the email in one line and re-classify with that summary attached. Cut the dumping-ground effect dramatically. Also found that fewer, longer examples beat longer definitions; the model learned the category boundaries better from edge cases than from prose. Solid write-up — the debugging metaphor is exactly right.
Thanks for reading, and for the detail. The summarize-then-reclassify pass is new to me. My classifier has no confidence signal. The model returns a reasoning field and a category, and genuine overlaps go to an ambiguous category rather than a low-confidence path. Where did your confidence signal come from? On examples versus definitions: my fixes went into definitions and evaluation order, and I never tested examples against them, so I can’t say how they’d compare. Worth trying on the boundary cases.
Rishabh Mishra
Ran into almost the exact same wall with an intake classifier last year. The thing that finally broke the cycle for me was treating "Other" as a signal instead of a category — when confidence was low I routed it through a second pass that had the model summarize the email in one line and re-classify with that summary attached. Cut the dumping-ground effect dramatically. Also found that fewer, longer examples beat longer definitions; the model learned the category boundaries better from edge cases than from prose. Solid write-up — the debugging metaphor is exactly right.