With the explosion of massive, widely available unlabeled data in the past years, finding label and time efficient, robust learning algorithms has become ever more important in theory and in practice. We study the paradigm of active learning, in which algorithms with access to large pools of data may adaptively choose what samples to label in the hope of exponentially increasing efficiency. By introducing comparisons, an additional type of query comparing two points, we provide the first time and query efficient algorithms for learning non-homogeneous linear separators robust to bounded (Massart) noise. We further provide algorithms for a generalization of the popular Tsybakov low noise condition, and show how comparisons provide a strong reliability guarantee that is often impractical or impossible with only labels - returning a classifier that makes no errors with high probability.
Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago（芝加哥丰田技术研究所）
In this work, we give the first algorithms for tolerant testing of nontrivial classes in the active model: estimating the distance of a target function to a hypothesis class C with respect to some arbitrary distribution D, using only a small number of label queries to a polynomial-sized pool of unlabeled examples drawn from D. Specifically, we show that for the class D of unions of d intervals on the line, we can estimate the error rate of the best hypothesis in the class to an additive error epsilon from only $O(\frac{1}{ε^6}\log \frac{1}ε)$ label queries to an unlabeled pool of size $O(\frac…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Deep learning has made significant breakthroughs in many fields, including electroencephalogram (EEG) based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). However, deep learning models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, in which deliberately designed small perturbations are added to the benign input samples to fool the deep learning model and degrade its performance. This paper considers transferability-based black-box attacks, where the attacker trains a substitute model to approximate the target model, and then generates adversarial examples from the substitute model to attack the target model. Learn…
Active learning is commonly used to train label-efficient models by adaptively selecting the most informative queries. However, most active learning strategies are designed to either learn a representation of the data (e.g., embedding or metric learning) or perform well on a task (e.g., classification) on the data. However, many machine learning tasks involve a combination of both representation learning and a task-specific goal. Motivated by this, we propose a novel unified query framework that can be applied to any problem in which a key component is learning a representation of the data tha…
Università degli Studi di Milano（米兰大学）；Università dell’Insubria（因苏布里亚大学）
We investigate the problem of active learning on a given tree whose nodes are assigned binary labels in an adversarial way. Inspired by recent results by Guillory and Bilmes, we characterize (up to constant factors) the optimal placement of queries so to minimize the mistakes made on the non-queried nodes. Our query selection algorithm is extremely efficient, and the optimal number of mistakes on the non-queried nodes is achieved by a simple and efficient mincut classifier. Through a simple modification of the query selection algorithm we also show optimality (up to constant factors) with resp…
The explosive growth of easily-accessible unlabeled data has lead to growing interest in active learning, a paradigm in which data-hungry learning algorithms adaptively select informative examples in order to lower prohibitively expensive labeling costs. Unfortunately, in standard worst-case models of learning, the active setting often provides no improvement over non-adaptive algorithms. To combat this, a series of recent works have considered a model in which the learner may ask enriched queries beyond labels. While such models have seen success in drastically lowering label costs, they tend…
Oxford Robotics Institute, University of Oxford（牛津大学牛津机器人研究所）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
This work presents a fault-tolerant control scheme for sensory faults in robotic manipulators based on active inference. In the majority of existing schemes, a binary decision of whether a sensor is healthy (functional) or faulty is made based on measured data. The decision boundary is called a threshold and it is usually deterministic. Following a faulty decision, fault recovery is obtained by excluding the malfunctioning sensor. We propose a stochastic fault-tolerant scheme based on active inference and precision learning which does not require a priori threshold definitions to trigger fault…
University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；Air Force Research Laboratory（美国空军研究实验室）
Learning a model of perceptual similarity from a collection of objects is a fundamental task in machine learning underlying numerous applications. A common way to learn such a model is from relative comparisons in the form of triplets: responses to queries of the form "Is object a more similar to b than it is to c?". If no consideration is made in the determination of which queries to ask, existing similarity learning methods can require a prohibitively large number of responses. In this work, we consider the problem of actively learning from triplets -finding which queries are most useful for…
We describe a slightly sub-exponential time algorithm for learning parity functions in the presence of random classification noise. This results in a polynomial-time algorithm for the case of parity functions that depend on only the first O(log n log log n) bits of input. This is the first known instance of an efficient noise-tolerant algorithm for a concept class that is provably not learnable in the Statistical Query model of Kearns. Thus, we demonstrate that the set of problems learnable in the statistical query model is a strict subset of those problems learnable in the presence of noise i…
We analyze the expected cost of a greedy active learning algorithm. Our analysis extends previous work to a more general setting in which different queries have different costs. Moreover, queries may have more than two possible responses and the distribution over hypotheses may be non uniform. Specific applications include active learning with label costs, active learning for multiclass and partial label queries, and batch mode active learning. We also discuss an approximate version of interest when there are very many queries.
We propose a hypergraph-based active learning scheme which we term $HS^2$, $HS^2$ generalizes the previously reported algorithm $S^2$ originally proposed for graph-based active learning with pointwise queries [Dasarathy et al., COLT 2015]. Our $HS^2$ method can accommodate hypergraph structures and allows one to ask both pointwise queries and pairwise queries. Based on a novel parametric system particularly designed for hypergraphs, we derive theoretical results on the query complexity of $HS^2$ for the above described generalized settings. Both the theoretical and empirical results show that …
Univ. of Milan（米兰大学）；Google（谷歌）；Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利技术研究院）；TU Wien（维也纳工业大学）
We study exact active learning of binary and multiclass classifiers with margin. Given an $n$-point set $X \subset \mathbb{R}^m$, we want to learn any unknown classifier on $X$ whose classes have finite strong convex hull margin, a new notion extending the SVM margin. In the standard active learning setting, where only label queries are allowed, learning a classifier with strong convex hull margin $γ$ requires in the worst case $Ω\big(1+\frac{1}γ\big)^{(m-1)/2}$ queries. On the other hand, using the more powerful seed queries (a variant of equivalence queries), the target classifier could be l…
Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt（克拉根福阿尔卑斯-亚德里亚大学）
Active Learning (AL) methods have proven cost-saving against passive supervised methods in many application domains. An active learner, aiming to find some target hypothesis, formulates sequential queries to some oracle. The set of hypotheses consistent with the already answered queries is called version space. Several query selection measures (QSMs) for determining the best query to ask next have been proposed. Assuming binaryoutcome queries, we analyze various QSMs wrt. to the discrimination power of their selected queries within the current version space. As a result, we derive superiority …
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；University of Arizona（亚利桑那大学）
Online machine learning systems need to adapt to domain shifts. Meanwhile, acquiring label at every timestep is expensive. We propose a surprisingly simple algorithm that adaptively balances its regret and its number of label queries in settings where the data streams are from a mixture of hidden domains. For online linear regression with oblivious adversaries, we provide a tight tradeoff that depends on the durations and dimensionalities of the hidden domains. Our algorithm can adaptively deal with interleaving spans of inputs from different domains. We also generalize our results to non-line…
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学香槟分校）；University of California, Irvine（加利福尼亚大学尔湾分校）；Eli Lilly and Company（礼来公司）
In this paper we propose an active metric learning method for clustering with pairwise constraints. The proposed method actively queries the label of informative instance pairs, while estimating underlying metrics by incorporating unlabeled instance pairs, which leads to a more accurate and efficient clustering process. In particular, we augment the queried constraints by generating more pairwise labels to provide additional information in learning a metric to enhance clustering performance. Furthermore, we increase the robustness of metric learning by updating the learned metric sequentially …
Université libre de Bruxelles（布鲁塞尔自由大学）；University of Antwerp – Flanders Make（安特卫普大学 - 弗兰德斯制造）
Active learning is a setting in which a student queries a teacher, through membership and equivalence queries, in order to learn a language. Performance on these algorithms is often measured in the number of queries required to learn a target, with an emphasis on costly equivalence queries. In graybox learning, the learning process is accelerated by foreknowledge of some information on the target. Here, we consider graybox active learning of subsequential string transducers, where a regular overapproximation of the domain is known by the student. We show that there exists an algorithm using st…
We introduce interactive structure discovery, a generic framework that encompasses many interactive learning settings, including active learning, top-k item identification, interactive drug discovery, and others. We adapt a recently developed active learning algorithm of Tosh and Dasgupta (2017) for interactive structure discovery, and show that the new algorithm can be made noise-tolerant and enjoys favorable query complexity bounds.
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；IBM Research - Almaden（IBM阿尔马登研究院）
We describe a framework for designing efficient active learning algorithms that are tolerant to random classification noise and are differentially-private. The framework is based on active learning algorithms that are statistical in the sense that they rely on estimates of expectations of functions of filtered random examples. It builds on the powerful statistical query framework of Kearns (1993). We show that any efficient active statistical learning algorithm can be automatically converted to an efficient active learning algorithm which is tolerant to random classification noise as well as o…
In the world of big data, large but costly to label datasets dominate many fields. Active learning, a semi-supervised alternative to the standard PAC-learning model, was introduced to explore whether adaptive labeling could learn concepts with exponentially fewer labeled samples. While previous results show that active learning performs no better than its supervised alternative for important concept classes such as linear separators, we show that by adding weak distributional assumptions and allowing comparison queries, active learning requires exponentially fewer samples. Further, we show tha…
Intelligent systems need to be able to recover from mistakes, resolve uncertainty, and adapt to novel concepts not seen during training. Dialog interaction can enable this by the use of clarifications for correction and resolving uncertainty, and active learning queries to learn new concepts encountered during operation. Prior work on dialog systems has either focused on exclusively learning how to perform clarification/ information seeking, or to perform active learning. In this work, we train a hierarchical dialog policy to jointly perform both clarification and active learning in the contex…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Imitation learning algorithms provide state-of-the-art results on many structured prediction tasks by learning near-optimal search policies. Such algorithms assume training-time access to an expert that can provide the optimal action at any queried state; unfortunately, the number of such queries is often prohibitive, frequently rendering these approaches impractical. To combat this query complexity, we consider an active learning setting in which the learning algorithm has additional access to a much cheaper noisy heuristic that provides noisy guidance. Our algorithm, LEAQI, learns a differen…
University of California, San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校）；Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, Berkeley（伯克利西蒙斯计算理论研究所）；Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）
We study an extension of active learning in which the learning algorithm may ask the annotator to compare the distances of two examples from the boundary of their label-class. For example, in a recommendation system application (say for restaurants), the annotator may be asked whether she liked or disliked a specific restaurant (a label query); or which one of two restaurants did she like more (a comparison query). We focus on the class of half spaces, and show that under natural assumptions, such as large margin or bounded bit-description of the input examples, it is possible to reveal all th…
The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project（理化学研究所高级智能项目中心）
Noisy pairwise comparison feedback has been incorporated to improve the overall query complexity of interactively learning binary classifiers. The \textit{positivity comparison oracle} is used to provide feedback on which is more likely to be positive given a pair of data points. Because it is impossible to infer accurate labels using this oracle alone \textit{without knowing the classification threshold}, existing methods still rely on the traditional \textit{explicit labeling oracle}, which directly answers the label given a data point. Existing methods conduct sorting on all data points and…
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）
In addition to high accuracy, robustness is becoming increasingly important for machine learning models in various applications. Recently, much research has been devoted to improving the model robustness by training with noise perturbations. Most existing studies assume a fixed perturbation level for all training examples, which however hardly holds in real tasks. In fact, excessive perturbations may destroy the discriminative content of an example, while deficient perturbations may fail to provide helpful information for improving the robustness. Motivated by this observation, we propose to a…
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering（电气与计算机工程学院）；School of Interactive Computing（交互计算学院）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
Many machine learning tasks such as clustering, classification, and dataset search benefit from embedding data points in a space where distances reflect notions of relative similarity as perceived by humans. A common way to construct such an embedding is to request triplet similarity queries to an oracle, comparing two objects with respect to a reference. This work generalizes triplet queries to tuple queries of arbitrary size that ask an oracle to rank multiple objects against a reference, and introduces an efficient and robust adaptive selection method called InfoTuple that uses a novel appr…
Univ. of Milan（米兰大学）；Google（谷歌）；Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利技术研究院）
We study an active cluster recovery problem where, given a set of $n$ points and an oracle answering queries like "are these two points in the same cluster?", the task is to recover exactly all clusters using as few queries as possible. We begin by introducing a simple but general notion of margin between clusters that captures, as special cases, the margins used in previous work, the classic SVM margin, and standard notions of stability for center-based clusterings. Then, under our margin assumptions we design algorithms that, in a variety of settings, recover all clusters exactly using only …
Active learning is a subfield of machine learning, in which the learning algorithm is allowed to choose the data from which it learns. In some cases, it has been shown that active learning can yield an exponential gain in the number of samples the algorithm needs to see, in order to reach generalization error $\leq ε$. In this work we study the problem of learning halfspaces with membership queries. In the membership query scenario, we allow the learning algorithm to ask for the label of every sample in the input space. We suggest a new algorithm for this problem, and prove it achieves a near …
Active learning aims to obtain a classifier of high accuracy by using fewer label requests in comparison to passive learning by selecting effective queries. Many active learning methods have been developed in the past two decades, which sample queries based on informativeness or representativeness of unlabeled data points. In this work, we explore a novel querying criterion based on statistical leverage scores. The statistical leverage scores of a row in a matrix are the squared row-norms of the matrix containing its (top) left singular vectors and is a measure of influence of the row on the m…
Department of Computer Science, KU Leuven（比利时鲁汶大学计算机科学系）
Constraint-based clustering algorithms exploit background knowledge to construct clusterings that are aligned with the interests of a particular user. This background knowledge is often obtained by allowing the clustering system to pose pairwise queries to the user: should these two elements be in the same cluster or not? Active clustering methods aim to minimize the number of queries needed to obtain a good clustering by querying the most informative pairs first. Ideally, a user should be able to answer a couple of these queries, inspect the resulting clustering, and repeat these two steps un…
We present a general-purpose active learning scheme for data in metric spaces. The algorithm maintains a collection of neighborhoods of different sizes and uses label queries to identify those that have a strong bias towards one particular label; when two such neighborhoods intersect and have different labels, the region of overlap is treated as a ``known unknown'' and is a target of future active queries. We give label complexity bounds for this method that do not rely on assumptions about the data and we instantiate them in several cases of interest.
Active learning is an important technique for low-resource sequence labeling tasks. However, current active sequence labeling methods use the queried samples alone in each iteration, which is an inefficient way of leveraging human annotations. We propose a simple but effective data augmentation method to improve the label efficiency of active sequence labeling. Our method, SeqMix, simply augments the queried samples by generating extra labeled sequences in each iteration. The key difficulty is to generate plausible sequences along with token-level labels. In SeqMix, we address this challenge b…
Learning functions with high-dimensional outputs is critical in many applications, such as physical simulation and engineering design. However, collecting training examples for these applications is often costly, e.g. by running numerical solvers. The recent work (Li et al., 2022) proposes the first multi-fidelity active learning approach for high-dimensional outputs, which can acquire examples at different fidelities to reduce the cost while improving the learning performance. However, this method only queries at one pair of fidelity and input at a time, and hence has a risk to bring in stron…
Collaborative filtering (CF) allows the preferences of multiple users to be pooled to make recommendations regarding unseen products. We consider in this paper the problem of online and interactive CF: given the current ratings associated with a user, what queries (new ratings) would most improve the quality of the recommendations made? We cast this terms of expected value of information (EVOI); but the online computational cost of computing optimal queries is prohibitive. We show how offline prototyping and computation of bounds on EVOI can be used to dramatically reduce the required online c…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；University of Texas Medical Branch（德克萨斯大学医学部）；Institute for Translational Sciences（转化科学研究所）；Electrical Engineering and Computer Science（电气工程与计算机科学学院）
The problem of active diagnosis arises in several applications such as disease diagnosis, and fault diagnosis in computer networks, where the goal is to rapidly identify the binary states of a set of objects (e.g., faulty or working) by sequentially selecting, and observing, (noisy) responses to binary valued queries. Current algorithms in this area rely on loopy belief propagation for active query selection. These algorithms have an exponential time complexity, making them slow and even intractable in large networks. We propose a rank-based greedy algorithm that sequentially chooses queries s…
Robot policies need to adapt to human preferences and/or new environments. Human experts may have the domain knowledge required to help robots achieve this adaptation. However, existing works often require costly offline re-training on human feedback, and those feedback usually need to be frequent and too complex for the humans to reliably provide. To avoid placing undue burden on human experts and allow quick adaptation in critical real-world situations, we propose designing and sparingly presenting easy-to-answer pairwise action preference queries in an online fashion. Our approach designs q…
Active Learning of Quantum System Hamiltonians yields Query Advantage
MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM Watson人工智能实验室）；Center for Ultracold Atoms, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院超冷原子中心）；Department of Physics, Co-Design Center for Quantum Advantage, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院物理系量子优势联合设计中心）；IBM Quantum, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center（IBM量子公司，IBM T.J.沃森研究中心）；IBM Research AI, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center（IBM研究人工智能部门，IBM T.J.沃森研究中心）
Solving sequential decision prediction problems, including those in imitation learning settings, requires mitigating the problem of covariate shift. The standard approach, DAgger, relies on capturing expert behaviour in all states that the agent reaches. In real-world settings, querying an expert is costly. We propose a new active learning algorithm that selectively queries the expert, based on both a prediction of agent error and a proxy for agent risk, that maintains the performance of unrestrained expert querying systems while substantially reducing the number of expert queries made. We sho…
