Programmatic weak supervision creates models without hand-labeled training data by combining the outputs of heuristic labelers. Existing frameworks make the restrictive assumption that labelers output a single class label. Enabling users to create partial labelers that output subsets of possible class labels would greatly expand the expressivity of programmatic weak supervision. We introduce this capability by defining a probabilistic generative model that can estimate the underlying accuracies of multiple noisy partial labelers without ground truth labels. We show how to scale up learning, for example learning on 100k examples in one minute, a 300x speed up compared to a naive implementation. We also prove that this class of models is generically identifiable up to label swapping under mild conditions. We evaluate our framework on three text classification and six object classification tasks. On text tasks, adding partial labels increases average accuracy by 8.6 percentage points. On image tasks, we show that partial labels allow us to approach some zero-shot object classification problems with programmatic weak supervision by using class attributes as partial labelers. On these tasks, our framework has accuracy comparable to recent embedding-based zero-shot learning methods, while using only pre-trained attribute detectors.
Most studies on learning from noisy labels rely on unrealistic models of i.i.d. label noise, such as class-conditional transition matrices. More recent work on instance-dependent noise models are more realistic, but assume a single generative process for label noise across the entire dataset. We propose a more principled model of label noise that generalizes instance-dependent noise to multiple labelers, based on the observation that modern datasets are typically annotated using distributed crowdsourcing methods. Under our labeler-dependent model, label noise manifests itself under two modalit…
Labeling data correctly is an expensive and challenging task in machine learning, especially for on-line data streams. Deep learning models especially require a large number of clean labeled data that is very difficult to acquire in real-world problems. Choosing useful data samples to label while minimizing the cost of labeling is crucial to maintain efficiency in the training process. When confronted with multiple labelers with different expertise and respective labeling costs, deciding which labeler to choose is nontrivial. In this paper, we consider a novel weak and strong labeler problem i…
Active Learning with Imperfect Labels: Optimal Labeler Assignment and Sample Selection
School of Industrial and Systems Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA 30332, USA（工业与系统工程学院 佐治亚理工学院 阿拉巴马州亚特兰大 30332, 美国）；Ford Motor Company（福特汽车公司）
The rawly collected training data often comes with separate noisy labels collected from multiple imperfect annotators (e.g., via crowdsourcing). A typical way of using these separate labels is to first aggregate them into one and apply standard training methods. The literature has also studied extensively on effective aggregation approaches. This paper revisits this choice and aims to provide an answer to the question of whether one should aggregate separate noisy labels into single ones or use them separately as given. We theoretically analyze the performance of both approaches under the empi…
As machine learning has become increasingly applied to medical imaging data, noise in training labels has emerged as an important challenge. Variability in diagnosis of medical images is well established; in addition, variability in training and attention to task among medical labelers may exacerbate this issue. Methods for identifying and mitigating the impact of low quality labels have been studied, but are not well characterized in medical imaging tasks. For instance, Noisy Cross-Validation splits the training data into halves, and has been shown to identify low-quality labels in computer v…
Inherent risk scoring is an important function in anti-money laundering, used for determining the riskiness of an individual during onboarding $\textit{before}$ fraudulent transactions occur. It is, however, often fraught with two challenges: (1) inconsistent notions of what constitutes as high or low risk by experts and (2) the lack of labeled data. This paper explores a new paradigm of data labeling and data collection to tackle these issues. The data labeling is choice-based; the expert does not provide an absolute risk score but merely chooses the most/least risky example out of a small ch…
The data-driven recovery of the unknown governing equations of dynamical systems has recently received an increasing interest. However, the identification of governing equations remains challenging when dealing with noisy and partial observations. Here, we address this challenge and investigate variational deep learning schemes. Within the proposed framework, we jointly learn an inference model to reconstruct the true states of the system and the governing laws of these states from series of noisy and partial data. In doing so, this framework bridges classical data assimilation and state-of-th…
Labeling real-world datasets is time consuming but indispensable for supervised machine learning models. A common solution is to distribute the labeling task across a large number of non-expert workers via crowd-sourcing. Due to the varying background and experience of crowd workers, the obtained labels are highly prone to errors and even detrimental to the learning models. In this paper, we advocate using hybrid intelligence, i.e., combining deep models and human experts, to design an end-to-end learning framework from noisy crowd-sourced data, especially in an on-line scenario. We first summ…
Partial multi-label learning (PML), which tackles the problem of learning multi-label prediction models from instances with overcomplete noisy annotations, has recently started gaining attention from the research community. In this paper, we propose a novel adversarial learning model, PML-GAN, under a generalized encoder-decoder framework for partial multi-label learning. The PML-GAN model uses a disambiguation network to identify noisy labels and uses a multi-label prediction network to map the training instances to the disambiguated label vectors, while deploying a generative adversarial net…
The identification of the governing equations of chaotic dynamical systems from data has recently emerged as a hot topic. While the seminal work by Brunton et al. reported proof-of-concepts for idealized observation setting for fully-observed systems, {\em i.e.} large signal-to-noise ratios and high-frequency sampling of all system variables, we here address the learning of data-driven representations of chaotic dynamics for partially-observed systems, including significant noise patterns and possibly lower and irregular sampling setting. Instead of considering training losses based on short-t…
Peking University（北京大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
In recent years, data-driven methods have been developed to learn dynamical systems and partial differential equations (PDE). The goal of such work is discovering unknown physics and the corresponding equations. However, prior to achieving this goal, major challenges remain to be resolved, including learning PDE under noisy data and limited discrete data. To overcome these challenges, in this work, a deep-learning based data-driven method, called DL-PDE, is developed to discover the governing PDEs of underlying physical processes. The DL-PDE method combines deep learning via neural networks an…
In this paper, we introduce PDE-LEARN, a novel deep learning algorithm that can identify governing partial differential equations (PDEs) directly from noisy, limited measurements of a physical system of interest. PDE-LEARN uses a Rational Neural Network, $U$, to approximate the system response function and a sparse, trainable vector, $ξ$, to characterize the hidden PDE that the system response function satisfies. Our approach couples the training of $U$ and $ξ$ using a loss function that (1) makes $U$ approximate the system response function, (2) encapsulates the fact that $U$ satisfies a hidd…
University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学）
We present a supervised learning method to learn the propagator map of a dynamical system from partial and noisy observations. In our computationally cheap and easy-to-implement framework a neural network consisting of random feature maps is trained sequentially by incoming observations within a data assimilation procedure. By employing Takens' embedding theorem, the network is trained on delay coordinates. We show that the combination of random feature maps and data assimilation, called RAFDA, outperforms standard random feature maps for which the dynamics is learned using batch data.
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）
Causal inference from observational datasets often relies on measuring and adjusting for covariates. In practice, measurements of the covariates can often be noisy and/or biased, or only measurements of their proxies may be available. Directly adjusting for these imperfect measurements of the covariates can lead to biased causal estimates. Moreover, without additional assumptions, the causal effects are not point-identifiable due to the noise in these measurements. To this end, we study the partial identification of causal effects given noisy covariates, under a user-specified assumption on th…
ALIM: Adjusting Label Importance Mechanism for Noisy Partial Label Learning
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Chongqing University（重庆大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
We consider learning Ising tree models when the observations from the nodes are corrupted by independent but non-identically distributed noise with unknown statistics. Katiyar et al. (2020) showed that although the exact tree structure cannot be recovered, one can recover a partial tree structure; that is, a structure belonging to the equivalence class containing the true tree. This paper presents a systematic improvement of Katiyar et al. (2020). First, we present a novel impossibility result by deriving a bound on the necessary number of samples for partial recovery. Second, we derive a sign…
Peking University（北京大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Data-driven discovery of partial differential equations (PDEs) has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Although significant progress has been made, certain unresolved issues remain. For example, for PDEs with high-order derivatives, the performance of existing methods is unsatisfactory, especially when the data are sparse and noisy. It is also difficult to discover heterogeneous parametric PDEs where heterogeneous parameters are embedded in the partial differential operators. In this work, a new framework combining deep-learning and integral form is proposed to handle the above-men…
Peking University（北京大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Data-driven methods have recently made great progress in the discovery of partial differential equations (PDEs) from spatial-temporal data. However, several challenges remain to be solved, including sparse noisy data, incomplete candidate library, and spatially- or temporally-varying coefficients. In this work, a new framework, which combines neural network, genetic algorithm and adaptive methods, is put forward to address all of these challenges simultaneously. In the framework, a trained neural network is utilized to calculate derivatives and generate a large amount of meta-data, which solve…
College of Software Engineering, Southeast University（东南大学软件学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University（东南大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Yam Pak Charitable Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences, Saint Francis University（圣弗朗西斯大学叶荫堂计算与信息科学学院）；Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学计算机科学系）
University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；Rice University（莱斯大学）
Graph signal processing (GSP) provides a powerful framework for analyzing signals arising in a variety of domains. In many applications of GSP, multiple network structures are available, each of which captures different aspects of the same underlying phenomenon. To integrate these different data sources, graph alignment techniques attempt to find the best correspondence between vertices of two graphs. We consider a generalization of this problem, where there is no natural one-to-one mapping between vertices, but where there is correspondence between the community structures of each graph. Beca…
Partial Maximum Correntropy Regression for Robust Trajectory Decoding from Noisy Epidural Electrocorticographic Signals
Institute of Innovative Research, Tokyo Institute of Technology（东京工业大学创新研究院）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学人工智能与机器人研究所）
Discovery of partial differential equations from highly noisy and sparse data with physics-informed information criterion
College of Engineering, Peking University（北京大学工学院）；Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics（应用物理与计算数学研究所）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Robust loss functions are essential for training accurate deep neural networks (DNNs) in the presence of noisy (incorrect) labels. It has been shown that the commonly used Cross Entropy (CE) loss is not robust to noisy labels. Whilst new loss functions have been designed, they are only partially robust. In this paper, we theoretically show by applying a simple normalization that: any loss can be made robust to noisy labels. However, in practice, simply being robust is not sufficient for a loss function to train accurate DNNs. By investigating several robust loss functions, we find that they su…
Scientific machine learning has been successfully applied to inverse problems and PDE discovery in computational physics. One caveat concerning current methods is the need for large amounts of ("clean") data, in order to characterize the full system response and discover underlying physical models. Bayesian methods may be particularly promising for overcoming these challenges, as they are naturally less sensitive to the negative effects of sparse and noisy data. In this paper, we propose to use Bayesian neural networks (BNN) in order to: 1) Recover the full system states from measurement data …
Physics-constrained robust learning of open-form partial differential equations from limited and noisy data
College of Engineering, Peking University（北京大学工学院）；Ningbo Institute of Digital Twin, Eastern Institute of Technology（东方理工大学宁波数字孪生研究院）；School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学环境科学与工程学院）；Eastern Institute for Advanced Study, Eastern Institute of Technology（东方理工大学东方高等研究院）
TU Dresden（德累斯顿工业大学）；Center for Systems Biology Dresden, Max Planck Institute of Molecular（马克斯·普朗克分子研究所德累斯顿系统生物学中心）；Flatiron Institute（弗莱提荣研究所）
We present a statistical learning framework for robust identification of partial differential equations from noisy spatiotemporal data. Extending previous sparse regression approaches for inferring PDE models from simulated data, we address key issues that have thus far limited the application of these methods to noisy experimental data, namely their robustness against noise and the need for manual parameter tuning. We address both points by proposing a stability-based model selection scheme to determine the level of regularization required for reproducible recovery of the underlying PDE. This…
Feature-Label Modal Alignment for Robust Partial Multi-Label Learning
School of Automation, Guangdong University of Technology（广东工业大学自动化学院）；Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Visual Object Detection and Recognition, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）深圳市视觉目标检测与识别重点实验室）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学计算机科学与工程学院）
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Chongqing University（重庆大学）；RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）
Partial label learning (PLL) is an important problem that allows each training example to be labeled with a coarse candidate set, which well suits many real-world data annotation scenarios with label ambiguity. Despite the promise, the performance of PLL often lags behind the supervised counterpart. In this work, we bridge the gap by addressing two key research challenges in PLL -- representation learning and label disambiguation -- in one coherent framework. Specifically, our proposed framework PiCO consists of a contrastive learning module along with a novel class prototype-based label disam…
University of North Carolina Asheville（北卡罗来纳大学阿什维尔分校）；University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）
The principle of maximum entropy is a broadly applicable technique for computing a distribution with the least amount of information possible while constrained to match empirically estimated feature expectations. However, in many real-world applications that use noisy sensors computing the feature expectations may be challenging due to partial observation of the relevant model variables. For example, a robot performing apprenticeship learning may lose sight of the agent it is learning from due to environmental occlusion. We show that in generalizing the principle of maximum entropy to these ty…
Taiwan AI Labs（台湾人工智能实验室）；National Taiwan University College of Medicine（台湾大学医学院）；Taipei Veterans General Hospital（台北荣民总医院）；Academia Sinica（中央研究院）
Delineation of cancerous regions in gigapixel whole slide images (WSIs) is a crucial diagnostic procedure in digital pathology. This process is time-consuming because of the large search space in the gigapixel WSIs, causing chances of omission and misinterpretation at indistinct tumor lesions. To tackle this, the development of an automated cancerous region segmentation method is imperative. We frame this issue as a modeling problem with partial label WSIs, where some cancerous regions may be misclassified as benign and vice versa, producing patches with noisy labels. To learn from these patch…
