Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://api-reference.scale.com/llms.txt
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Multi-Stage Overview
Multi-stage is our most advanced and flexible task type. It is designed to handle complex full-scene labeling that spans multiple annotation types and modalities, and serves as a replacement for Scale’s legacy dependent tasks system (which requires using multiple tasks to fully label a scene). On a multi-stage task, labeling is split up into multiple stages. Stages are organized in a pipeline such that they are dependent on one another, and can run sequentially or in parallel. As a task passes through a stage, Scale adds labels corresponding to taxonomy classes enabled for that stage. Once all stages are completed, the task is then finalized and delivered.
Blueprints
All multi-stage tasks are created with a blueprint, which is defined separately prior to task creation. Each task’s blueprint dictates its stages, stage dependencies (pipeline), their respective taxonomies, and the values of any stage-specific parameters. Blueprints may also include conditional logic, so that certain stages are only enabled if specific criteria are met (e.g. if there is an attribute with a specific value in the prior stage). Multi-stage projects may contain one or many blueprints, but only one blueprint can be “active” at any given time. New multi-stage tasks will use the project’s active blueprint by default, but may also use a different blueprint from the project if specified during task creation.
Dependent Tasks vs Multi-Stage Tasks
| Dependent Tasks | Multi-Stage Tasks | |
|---|---|---|
| Task Creation | - Multiple tasks per scene - Complex payloads containing fully defined dependencies and taxonomies - Error-prone, frequently requires manual backfills to fix payload errors | - One task per scene - Simple payload referencing a single pre-defined blueprint - On-rails, payloads are much less likely to contain errors |
| Project Management | - Many projects, one for each dependency - Difficult to track all the different tasks across all projects for each scene | - One project - Each scene is labeled with just one task |
| Task Delivery | - Annotations are delivered across multiple tasks, each with a separate response | - Annotations are delivered in a single task with a single response (task-level delivery), or delivered separately for each stage (stage-level delivery) |
| Auditing | - Multiple audits across dependent tasks to fully audit a scene - Support for Standard audits only | - One audit is sufficient to review all annotations in the scene - Supports both Standard Audits (stage-level delivery only) and Fixless Audit |