Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Big Data and Brain Computing（北京大数据与脑计算高精尖创新中心）；China’s Aviation System Engineering Research Institute（中国航空系统工程研究所）
This paper explores the integration of symbolic logic knowledge into deep neural networks for learning from noisy crowd labels. We introduce Logic-guided Learning from Noisy Crowd Labels (Logic-LNCL), an EM-alike iterative logic knowledge distillation framework that learns from both noisy labeled data and logic rules of interest. Unlike traditional EM methods, our framework contains a ``pseudo-E-step'' that distills from the logic rules a new type of learning target, which is then used in the ``pseudo-M-step'' for training the classifier. Extensive evaluations on two real-world datasets for text sentiment classification and named entity recognition demonstrate that the proposed framework improves the state-of-the-art and provides a new solution to learning from noisy crowd labels.
Most crowdsourcing learning methods treat disagreement between annotators as noisy labelings while inter-disagreement among experts is often a good indicator for the ambiguity and uncertainty that is inherent in natural language. In this paper, we propose a framework called Learning Ambiguity from Crowd Sequential Annotations (LA-SCA) to explore the inter-disagreement between reliable annotators and effectively preserve confusing label information. First, a hierarchical Bayesian model is developed to infer ground-truth from crowds and group the annotators with similar reliability together. By …
As a means of human-based computation, crowdsourcing has been widely used to annotate large-scale unlabeled datasets. One of the obvious challenges is how to aggregate these possibly noisy labels provided by a set of heterogeneous annotators. Another challenge stems from the difficulty in evaluating the annotator reliability without even knowing the ground truth, which can be used to build incentive mechanisms in crowdsourcing platforms. When each instance is associated with many possible labels simultaneously, the problem becomes even harder because of its combinatorial nature. In this paper,…
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹自由大学）；IBM CAS Benelux（IBM比荷卢系统中心）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Distant supervision is a popular method for performing relation extraction from text that is known to produce noisy labels. Most progress in relation extraction and classification has been made with crowdsourced corrections to distant-supervised labels, and there is evidence that indicates still more would be better. In this paper, we explore the problem of propagating human annotation signals gathered for open-domain relation classification through the CrowdTruth methodology for crowdsourcing, that captures ambiguity in annotations by measuring inter-annotator disagreement. Our approach propa…
School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University（苏州大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Heilongjiang University（黑龙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Shenzhen Gowild Robotics Co. Ltd（深圳狗尾草智能科技有限公司）
To quickly obtain new labeled data, we can choose crowdsourcing as an alternative way at lower cost in a short time. But as an exchange, crowd annotations from non-experts may be of lower quality than those from experts. In this paper, we propose an approach to performing crowd annotation learning for Chinese Named Entity Recognition (NER) to make full use of the noisy sequence labels from multiple annotators. Inspired by adversarial learning, our approach uses a common Bi-LSTM and a private Bi-LSTM for representing annotator-generic and -specific information. The annotator-generic information…
Samples with ground truth labels may not always be available in numerous domains. While learning from crowdsourcing labels has been explored, existing models can still fail in the presence of sparse, unreliable, or diverging annotations. Co-teaching methods have shown promising improvements for computer vision problems with noisy labels by employing two classifiers trained on each others' confident samples in each batch. Inspired by the idea of separating confident and uncertain samples during the training process, we extend it for the crowdsourcing problem. Our model, CrowdTeacher, uses the i…
Learning From Crowdsourced Noisy Labels: A Signal Processing Perspective
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Central Florida（中央佛罗里达大学电气与计算机工程系）；School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学电气工程与计算机科学学院）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学电气与计算机工程系）
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…
An important way to make large training sets is to gather noisy labels from crowds of non experts. We propose a method to aggregate noisy labels collected from a crowd of workers or annotators. Eliciting labels is important in tasks such as judging web search quality and rating products. Our method assumes that labels are generated by a probability distribution over items and labels. We formulate the method by drawing parallels between Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) and Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) and show that the problem of vote aggregation can be viewed as one of clustering. We use…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Amazon Web Services（亚马逊云科技）
Supervised learning depends on annotated examples, which are taken to be the \emph{ground truth}. But these labels often come from noisy crowdsourcing platforms, like Amazon Mechanical Turk. Practitioners typically collect multiple labels per example and aggregate the results to mitigate noise (the classic crowdsourcing problem). Given a fixed annotation budget and unlimited unlabeled data, redundant annotation comes at the expense of fewer labeled examples. This raises two fundamental questions: (1) How can we best learn from noisy workers? (2) How should we allocate our labeling budget to ma…
Multi-label classification is a common supervised machine learning problem where each instance is associated with multiple classes. The key challenge in this problem is learning the correlations between the classes. An additional challenge arises when the labels of the training instances are provided by noisy, heterogeneous crowdworkers with unknown qualities. We first assume labels from a perfect source and propose a novel topic model where the present as well as the absent classes generate the latent topics and hence the words. We non-trivially extend our topic model to the scenario where th…
University of Leeds（利兹大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）
Crowd simulation is a central topic in several fields including graphics. To achieve high-fidelity simulations, data has been increasingly relied upon for analysis and simulation guidance. However, the information in real-world data is often noisy, mixed and unstructured, making it difficult for effective analysis, therefore has not been fully utilized. With the fast-growing volume of crowd data, such a bottleneck needs to be addressed. In this paper, we propose a new framework which comprehensively tackles this problem. It centers at an unsupervised method for analysis. The method takes as in…
Kyoto University（京都大学）；NTT Communication Science Laboratories（NTT通信科学实验室）
The differentiable implementation of logic yields a seamless combination of symbolic reasoning and deep neural networks. Recent research, which has developed a differentiable framework to learn logic programs from examples, can even acquire reasonable solutions from noisy datasets. However, this framework severely limits expressions for solutions, e.g., no function symbols are allowed, and the shapes of clauses are fixed. As a result, the framework cannot deal with structured examples. Therefore we propose a new framework to learn logic programs from noisy and structured examples, including th…
We propose a scalable Bayesian preference learning method for jointly predicting the preferences of individuals as well as the consensus of a crowd from pairwise labels. Peoples' opinions often differ greatly, making it difficult to predict their preferences from small amounts of personal data. Individual biases also make it harder to infer the consensus of a crowd when there are few labels per item. We address these challenges by combining matrix factorisation with Gaussian processes, using a Bayesian approach to account for uncertainty arising from noisy and sparse data. Our method exploits …
Digital crowdsourcing (CS) is a modern approach to perform certain large projects using small contributions of a large crowd. In CS, a taskmaster typically breaks down the project into small batches of tasks and assigns them to so-called workers with imperfect skill levels. The crowdsourcer then collects and analyzes the results for inference and serving the purpose of the project. In this work, the CS problem, as a human-in-the-loop computation problem, is modeled and analyzed in an information theoretic rate-distortion framework. The purpose is to identify the ultimate fidelity that one can …
Georgia Tech（佐治亚理工学院）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）；CUHK（香港中文大学）；CUHK Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；IBM Research AI（IBM人工智能研究院）；Google（谷歌）；Biomap；MBZUAI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
Events across a timeline are a common data representation, seen in different temporal modalities. Individual atomic events can occur in a certain temporal ordering to compose higher level composite events. Examples of a composite event are a patient's medical symptom or a baseball player hitting a home run, caused distinct temporal orderings of patient vitals and player movements respectively. Such salient composite events are provided as labels in temporal datasets and most works optimize models to predict these composite event labels directly. We focus on uncovering the underlying atomic eve…
Causal Discovery Should Embrace the Wisdom of the Crowd
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Washington（华盛顿大学工业与系统工程系）；Department of Applied Mathematics, Illinois Institute of Technology（伊利诺伊理工学院应用数学系）；Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University（德克萨斯阿灵顿大学电气与计算机工程系）
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…
Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院）；IBM India Research Labs（IBM印度研究实验室）
We study the problem of training an accurate linear regression model by procuring labels from multiple noisy crowd annotators, under a budget constraint. We propose a Bayesian model for linear regression in crowdsourcing and use variational inference for parameter estimation. To minimize the number of labels crowdsourced from the annotators, we adopt an active learning approach. In this specific context, we prove the equivalence of well-studied criteria of active learning like entropy minimization and expected error reduction. Interestingly, we observe that we can decouple the problems of iden…
One-Step Abductive Multi-Target Learning with Diverse Noisy Samples and Its Application to Tumour Segmentation for Breast Cancer
Institute of Clinical Pathology, West China Hospital, Sichuan University（四川大学华西医院临床病理研究所）；ZHONG JIU Flash Medical Technology Co., Ltd.（中玖闪光医疗科技有限公司）；Department of Pathology, West China Hospital, Sichuan University（四川大学华西医院病理科）；Department of Civil Engineering, McGill University（麦吉尔大学土木工程系）
National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology（计算机软件新技术国家重点实验室）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
Deep neural networks need large amounts of labeled data to achieve good performance. In real-world applications, labels are usually collected from non-experts such as crowdsourcing to save cost and thus are noisy. In the past few years, deep learning methods for dealing with noisy labels have been developed, many of which are based on the small-loss criterion. However, there are few theoretical analyses to explain why these methods could learn well from noisy labels. In this paper, we theoretically explain why the widely-used small-loss criterion works. Based on the explanation, we reformalize…
Southwest University（西南大学）；George Mason University（乔治梅森大学）；King Abdullah University of Science and Technology（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）
Crowdsourcing is a relatively economic and efficient solution to collect annotations from the crowd through online platforms. Answers collected from workers with different expertise may be noisy and unreliable, and the quality of annotated data needs to be further maintained. Various solutions have been attempted to obtain high-quality annotations. However, they all assume that workers' label quality is stable over time (always at the same level whenever they conduct the tasks). In practice, workers' attention level changes over time, and the ignorance of which can affect the reliability of th…
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…
Multi-label classification (MLC) is a generalization of standard classification where multiple labels may be assigned to a given sample. In the real world, it is more common to deal with noisy datasets than clean datasets, given how modern datasets are labeled by a large group of annotators on crowdsourcing platforms, but little attention has been given to evaluating multi-label classifiers with noisy labels. Exploiting label correlations now becomes a standard component of a multi-label classifier to achieve competitive performance. However, this component makes the classifier more prone to p…
Visual sentiment analysis has received increasing attention in recent years. However, the dataset's quality is a concern because the sentiment labels are crowd-sourcing, subjective, and prone to mistakes, and poses a severe threat to the data-driven models, especially the deep neural networks. The deep models would generalize poorly on the testing cases when trained to over-fit the training samples with noisy sentiment labels. Inspired by the recent progress on learning with noisy labels, we propose a robust learning method to perform robust visual sentiment analysis. Our method relies on exte…
ANDRE: An Attention-based Neuro-symbolic Differentiable Rule Extractor for Inductive Logic Programming
Dept. of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, George Washington University, USA（机械与航空航天工程系，乔治华盛顿大学）；Dept. of Mechanical Engineering Sciences, University of Surrey, UK（机械工程科学系，萨里大学）
Centre for Quantum Computation and Intelligent Systems（量子计算与智能系统中心）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
The convergence of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) using convex loss functions has been widely studied. However, vanilla SGD methods using convex losses cannot perform well with noisy labels, which adversely affect the update of the primal variable in SGD methods. Unfortunately, noisy labels are ubiquitous in real world applications such as crowdsourcing. To handle noisy labels, in this paper, we present a family of robust losses for SGD methods. By employing our robust losses, SGD methods successfully reduce negative effects caused by noisy labels on each update of the primal variable. We n…
