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In this paper we address the problem of pool based active learning, and provide an algorithm, called UPAL, that works by minimizing the unbiased estimator of the risk of a hypothesis in a given hypothesis space. For the space of linear classifiers and the squared loss we show that UPAL is equivalent to an exponentially weighted average forecaster. Exploiting some recent results regarding the spectra of random matrices allows us to establish consistency of UPAL when the true hypothesis is a linear hypothesis. Empirical comparison with an active learner implementation in Vowpal Wabbit, and a previously proposed pool based active learner implementation show good empirical performance and better scalability.
libact is a Python package designed to make active learning easier for general users. The package not only implements several popular active learning strategies, but also features the active-learning-by-learning meta-algorithm that assists the users to automatically select the best strategy on the fly. Furthermore, the package provides a unified interface for implementing more strategies, models and application-specific labelers. The package is open-source on Github, and can be easily installed from Python Package Index repository.
Authentication is the task of confirming the matching relationship between a data instance and a given identity. Typical examples of authentication problems include face recognition and person re-identification. Data-driven authentication could be affected by undesired biases, i.e., the models are often trained in one domain (e.g., for people wearing spring outfits) while applied in other domains (e.g., they change the clothes to summer outfits). Previous works have made efforts to eliminate domain-difference. They typically assume domain annotations are provided, and all the domains share classes. However, for authentication, there could be a large number of domains shared by different identities/classes, and it is impossible to annotate these domains exhaustively. It could make domain-difference challenging to model and eliminate. In this paper, we propose a domain-agnostic method that eliminates domain-difference without domain labels. We alternately perform latent domain discovery and domain-difference elimination until our model no longer detects domain-difference. In our approach, the latent domains are discovered by learning the heterogeneous predictive relationships between inputs and outputs. Then domain-difference is eliminated in both class-dependent and class-independent spaces to improve robustness of elimination. We further extend our method to a meta-learning framework to pursue more thorough domain-difference elimination. Comprehensive empirical evaluation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed method.
Active learning is usually applied to acquire labels of informative data points in supervised learning, to maximize accuracy in a sample-efficient way. However, maximizing the accuracy is not the end goal when the results are used for decision-making, for example in personalized medicine or economics. We argue that when acquiring samples sequentially, separating learning and decision-making is sub-optimal, and we introduce a novel active learning strategy which takes the down-the-line decision problem into account. Specifically, we introduce a novel active learning criterion which maximizes the expected information gain on the posterior distribution of the optimal decision. We compare our decision-making-aware active learning strategy to existing alternatives on both simulated and real data, and show improved performance in decision-making accuracy.
Learning from unlabeled and noisy data is one of the grand challenges of machine learning. As such, it has seen a flurry of research with new ideas proposed continuously. In this work, we revisit a classical idea: Steins Unbiased Risk Estimator (SURE). We show that, in the context of image recovery, SURE and its generalizations can be used to train convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for a range of image denoising and recovery problems without any ground truth data. Specifically, our goal is to reconstruct an image $x$ from a noisy linear transformation (measurement) of the image. We consider two scenarios: one where no additional data is available and one where we have measurements of other images that are drawn from the same noisy distribution as $x$, but have no access to the clean images. Such is the case, for instance, in the context of medical imaging, microscopy, and astronomy, where noise-less ground truth data is rarely available. We show that in this situation, SURE can be used to estimate the mean-squared-error loss associated with an estimate of $x$. Using this estimate of the loss, we train networks to perform denoising and compressed sensing recovery. In addition, we also use the SURE framework to partially explain and improve upon an intriguing results presented by Ulyanov et al. in Deep Image Prior: that a network initialized with random weights and fit to a single noisy image can effectively denoise that image. Public implementations of the networks and methods described in this paper can be found at https://github.com/ricedsp/D-AMP_Toolbox.
In this paper we model the problem of learning preferences of a population as an active learning problem. We propose an algorithm can adaptively choose pairs of items to show to users coming from a heterogeneous population, and use the obtained reward to decide which pair of items to show next. We provide computationally efficient algorithms with provable sample complexity guarantees for this problem in both the noiseless and noisy cases. In the process of establishing sample complexity guarantees for our algorithms, we establish new results using a Nystr{o}m-like method which can be of independent interest. We supplement our theoretical results with experimental comparisons.