3,480 research outputs found
Learning From Noisy Singly-labeled Data
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 maximize the
performance of a classifier? We propose a new algorithm for jointly modeling
labels and worker quality from noisy crowd-sourced data. The alternating
minimization proceeds in rounds, estimating worker quality from disagreement
with the current model and then updating the model by optimizing a loss
function that accounts for the current estimate of worker quality. Unlike
previous approaches, even with only one annotation per example, our algorithm
can estimate worker quality. We establish a generalization error bound for
models learned with our algorithm and establish theoretically that it's better
to label many examples once (vs less multiply) when worker quality is above a
threshold. Experiments conducted on both ImageNet (with simulated noisy
workers) and MS-COCO (using the real crowdsourced labels) confirm our
algorithm's benefits.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figure
Crowdsourcing for Engineering Design: Objective Evaluations and Subjective Preferences
Crowdsourcing enables designers to reach out to large numbers of people who may not have been previously considered when designing a new product, listen to their input by aggregating their preferences and evaluations over potential designs, aiming to improve ``good'' and catch ``bad'' design decisions during the early-stage design process. This approach puts human designers--be they industrial designers, engineers, marketers, or executives--at the forefront, with computational crowdsourcing systems on the backend to aggregate subjective preferences (e.g., which next-generation Brand A design best competes stylistically with next-generation Brand B designs?) or objective evaluations (e.g., which military vehicle design has the best situational awareness?). These crowdsourcing aggregation systems are built using probabilistic approaches that account for the irrationality of human behavior (i.e., violations of reflexivity, symmetry, and transitivity), approximated by modern machine learning algorithms and optimization techniques as necessitated by the scale of data (millions of data points, hundreds of thousands of dimensions).
This dissertation presents research findings suggesting the unsuitability of current off-the-shelf crowdsourcing aggregation algorithms for real engineering design tasks due to the sparsity of expertise in the crowd, and methods that mitigate this limitation by incorporating appropriate information for expertise prediction. Next, we introduce and interpret a number of new probabilistic models for crowdsourced design to provide large-scale preference prediction and full design space generation, building on statistical and machine learning techniques such as sampling methods, variational inference, and deep representation learning. Finally, we show how these models and algorithms can advance crowdsourcing systems by abstracting away the underlying appropriate yet unwieldy mathematics, to easier-to-use visual interfaces practical for engineering design companies and governmental agencies engaged in complex engineering systems design.PhDDesign ScienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133438/1/aburnap_1.pd
Project RISE: Recognizing Industrial Smoke Emissions
Industrial smoke emissions pose a significant concern to human health. Prior
works have shown that using Computer Vision (CV) techniques to identify smoke
as visual evidence can influence the attitude of regulators and empower
citizens to pursue environmental justice. However, existing datasets are not of
sufficient quality nor quantity to train the robust CV models needed to support
air quality advocacy. We introduce RISE, the first large-scale video dataset
for Recognizing Industrial Smoke Emissions. We adopted a citizen science
approach to collaborate with local community members to annotate whether a
video clip has smoke emissions. Our dataset contains 12,567 clips from 19
distinct views from cameras that monitored three industrial facilities. These
daytime clips span 30 days over two years, including all four seasons. We ran
experiments using deep neural networks to establish a strong performance
baseline and reveal smoke recognition challenges. Our survey study discussed
community feedback, and our data analysis displayed opportunities for
integrating citizen scientists and crowd workers into the application of
Artificial Intelligence for social good.Comment: Technical repor
Context Embedding Networks
Low dimensional embeddings that capture the main variations of interest in
collections of data are important for many applications. One way to construct
these embeddings is to acquire estimates of similarity from the crowd. However,
similarity is a multi-dimensional concept that varies from individual to
individual. Existing models for learning embeddings from the crowd typically
make simplifying assumptions such as all individuals estimate similarity using
the same criteria, the list of criteria is known in advance, or that the crowd
workers are not influenced by the data that they see. To overcome these
limitations we introduce Context Embedding Networks (CENs). In addition to
learning interpretable embeddings from images, CENs also model worker biases
for different attributes along with the visual context i.e. the visual
attributes highlighted by a set of images. Experiments on two noisy crowd
annotated datasets show that modeling both worker bias and visual context
results in more interpretable embeddings compared to existing approaches.Comment: CVPR 2018 spotligh
Outsourcing labour to the cloud
Various forms of open sourcing to the online population are establishing themselves as cheap, effective methods of getting work done. These have revolutionised the traditional methods for innovation and have contributed to the enrichment of the concept of 'open innovation'. To date, the literature concerning this emerging topic has been spread across a diverse number of media, disciplines and academic journals. This paper attempts for the first time to survey the emerging phenomenon of open outsourcing of work to the internet using 'cloud computing'. The paper describes the volunteer origins and recent commercialisation of this business service. It then surveys the current platforms, applications and academic literature. Based on this, a generic classification for crowdsourcing tasks and a number of performance metrics are proposed. After discussing strengths and limitations, the paper concludes with an agenda for academic research in this new area
Becoming the Expert - Interactive Multi-Class Machine Teaching
Compared to machines, humans are extremely good at classifying images into
categories, especially when they possess prior knowledge of the categories at
hand. If this prior information is not available, supervision in the form of
teaching images is required. To learn categories more quickly, people should
see important and representative images first, followed by less important
images later - or not at all. However, image-importance is individual-specific,
i.e. a teaching image is important to a student if it changes their overall
ability to discriminate between classes. Further, students keep learning, so
while image-importance depends on their current knowledge, it also varies with
time.
In this work we propose an Interactive Machine Teaching algorithm that
enables a computer to teach challenging visual concepts to a human. Our
adaptive algorithm chooses, online, which labeled images from a teaching set
should be shown to the student as they learn. We show that a teaching strategy
that probabilistically models the student's ability and progress, based on
their correct and incorrect answers, produces better 'experts'. We present
results using real human participants across several varied and challenging
real-world datasets.Comment: CVPR 201
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