Deep learning from crowds

Over the last few years, deep learning has revolutionized the field of machine learning by dramatically improving the state-of-the-art in various domains. However, as the size of supervised artificial neural networks grows, typically so does the need for larger labeled datasets. Recently, crowdsourcing has established itself as an efficient and cost-effective solution for labeling large sets of data in a scalable manner, but it often requires aggregating labels from multiple noisy contributors with different levels of expertise. In this paper, we address the problem of learning deep neural networks from crowds. We begin by describing an EM algorithm for jointly learning the parameters of the network and the reliabilities of the annotators. Then, a novel general-purpose crowd layer is proposed, which allows us to train deep neural networks end-to-end, directly from the noisy labels of multiple annotators, using only backpropagation. We empirically show that the proposed approach is able to internally capture the reliability and biases of different annotators and achieve new state-of-the-art results for various crowdsourced datasets across different settings, namely classification, regression and sequence labeling.Comment: 10 pages, The Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 201

Local Regularization Assisted Orthogonal Least Squares Regression

A locally regularized orthogonal least squares (LROLS) algorithm is proposed for constructing parsimonious or sparse regression models that generalize well. By associating each orthogonal weight in the regression model with an individual regularization parameter, the ability for the orthogonal least squares (OLS) model selection to produce a very sparse model with good generalization performance is greatly enhanced. Furthermore, with the assistance of local regularization, when to terminate the model selection procedure becomes much clearer. This LROLS algorithm has computational advantages over the recently introduced relevance vector machine (RVM) method