No Arabic abstract
We consider a novel data driven approach for designing learning algorithms that can effectively learn with only a small number of labeled examples. This is crucial for modern machine learning applications where labels are scarce or expensive to obtain. We focus on graph-based techniques, where the unlabeled examples are connected in a graph under the implicit assumption that similar nodes likely have similar labels. Over the past decades, several elegant graph-based semi-supervised and active learning algorithms for how to infer the labels of the unlabeled examples given the graph and a few labeled examples have been proposed. However, the problem of how to create the graph (which impacts the practical usefulness of these methods significantly) has been relegated to domain-specific art and heuristics and no general principles have been proposed. In this work we present a novel data driven approach for learning the graph and provide strong formal guarantees in both the distributional and online learning formalizations. We show how to leverage problem instances coming from an underlying problem domain to learn the graph hyperparameters from commonly used parametric families of graphs that perform well on new instances coming from the same domain. We obtain low regret and efficient algorithms in the online setting, and generalization guarantees in the distributional setting. We also show how to combine several very different similarity metrics and learn multiple hyperparameters, providing general techniques to apply to large classes of problems. We expect some of the tools and techniques we develop along the way to be of interest beyond semi-supervised and active learning, for data driven algorithms for combinatorial problems more generally.
Representation learning has been proven to play an important role in the unprecedented success of machine learning models in numerous tasks, such as machine translation, face recognition and recommendation. The majority of existing representation learning approaches often require a large number of consistent and noise-free labels. However, due to various reasons such as budget constraints and privacy concerns, labels are very limited in many real-world scenarios. Directly applying standard representation learning approaches on small labeled data sets will easily run into over-fitting problems and lead to sub-optimal solutions. Even worse, in some domains such as education, the limited labels are usually annotated by multiple workers with diverse expertise, which yields noises and inconsistency in such crowdsourcing settings. In this paper, we propose a novel framework which aims to learn effective representations from limited data with crowdsourced labels. Specifically, we design a grouping based deep neural network to learn embeddings from a limited number of training samples and present a Bayesian confidence estimator to capture the inconsistency among crowdsourced labels. Furthermore, to expedite the training process, we develop a hard example selection procedure to adaptively pick up training examples that are misclassified by the model. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world data sets demonstrate the superiority of our framework on learning representations from limited data with crowdsourced labels, comparing with various state-of-the-art baselines. In addition, we provide a comprehensive analysis on each of the main components of our proposed framework and also introduce the promising results it achieved in our real production to fully understand the proposed framework.
Despite the success of deep neural networks (DNNs) in image classification tasks, the human-level performance relies on massive training data with high-quality manual annotations, which are expensive and time-consuming to collect. There exist many inexpensive data sources on the web, but they tend to contain inaccurate labels. Training on noisy labeled datasets causes performance degradation because DNNs can easily overfit to the label noise. To overcome this problem, we propose a noise-tolerant training algorithm, where a meta-learning update is performed prior to conventional gradient update. The proposed meta-learning method simulates actual training by generating synthetic noisy labels, and train the model such that after one gradient update using each set of synthetic noisy labels, the model does not overfit to the specific noise. We conduct extensive experiments on the noisy CIFAR-10 dataset and the Clothing1M dataset. The results demonstrate the advantageous performance of the proposed method compared to several state-of-the-art baselines.
Distantly-labeled data can be used to scale up training of statistical models, but it is typically noisy and that noise can vary with the distant labeling technique. In this work, we propose a two-stage procedure for handling this type of data: denoise it with a learned model, then train our final model on clean and denoised distant data with standard supervised training. Our denoising approach consists of two parts. First, a filtering function discards examples from the distantly labeled data that are wholly unusable. Second, a relabeling function repairs noisy labels for the retained examples. Each of these components is a model trained on synthetically-noised examples generated from a small manually-labeled set. We investigate this approach on the ultra-fine entity typing task of Choi et al. (2018). Our baseline model is an extension of their model with pre-trained ELMo representations, which already achieves state-of-the-art performance. Adding distant data that has been denoised with our learned models gives further performance gains over this base model, outperforming models trained on raw distant data or heuristically-denoised distant data.
Noisy labeled data is more a norm than a rarity for self-generated content that is continuously published on the web and social media. Due to privacy concerns and governmental regulations, such a data stream can only be stored and used for learning purposes in a limited duration. To overcome the noise in this on-line scenario we propose QActor which novel combines: the selection of supposedly clean samples via quality models and actively querying an oracle for the most informative true labels. While the former can suffer from low data volumes of on-line scenarios, the latter is constrained by the availability and costs of human experts. QActor swiftly combines the merits of quality models for data filtering and oracle queries for cleaning the most informative data. The objective of QActor is to leverage the stringent oracle budget to robustly maximize the learning accuracy. QActor explores various strategies combining different query allocations and uncertainty measures. A central feature of QActor is to dynamically adjust the query limit according to the learning loss for each data batch. We extensively evaluate different image datasets fed into the classifier that can be standard machine learning (ML) models or deep neural networks (DNN) with noise label ratios ranging between 30% and 80%. Our results show that QActor can nearly match the optimal accuracy achieved using only clean data at the cost of at most an additional 6% of ground truth data from the oracle.
In the field of machine learning there is a growing interest towards more robust and generalizable algorithms. This is for example important to bridge the gap between the environment in which the training data was collected and the environment where the algorithm is deployed. Machine learning algorithms have increasingly been shown to excel in finding patterns and correlations from data. Determining the consistency of these patterns and for example the distinction between causal correlations and nonsensical spurious relations has proven to be much more difficult. In this paper a regularization scheme is introduced that prefers universal causal correlations. This approach is based on 1) the robustness of causal correlations and 2) the data not being independently and identically distribute (i.i.d.). The scheme is demonstrated with a classification task by clustering the (non-i.i.d.) training set in subpopulations. A non-i.i.d. regularization term is then introduced that penalizes weights that are not invariant over these clusters. The resulting algorithm favours correlations that are universal over the subpopulations and indeed a better performance is obtained on an out-of-distribution test set with respect to a more conventional l_2-regularization.