50 research outputs found
Efficient crowdsourcing for multi-class labeling
Crowdsourcing systems like Amazon's Mechanical Turk have emerged as an effective large-scale human-powered platform for performing tasks in domains such as image classification, data entry, recommendation, and proofreading. Since workers are low-paid (a few cents per task) and tasks performed are monotonous, the answers obtained are noisy and hence unreliable. To obtain reliable estimates, it is essential to utilize appropriate inference algorithms (e.g. Majority voting) coupled with structured redundancy through task assignment. Our goal is to obtain the best possible trade-off between reliability and redundancy. In this paper, we consider a general probabilistic model for noisy observations for crowd-sourcing systems and pose the problem of minimizing the total price (i.e. redundancy) that must be paid to achieve a target overall reliability. Concretely, we show that it is possible to obtain an answer to each task correctly with probability 1-ε as long as the redundancy per task is O((K/q) log (K/ε)), where each task can have any of the distinct answers equally likely, q is the crowd-quality parameter that is defined through a probabilistic model. Further, effectively this is the best possible redundancy-accuracy trade-off any system design can achieve. Such a single-parameter crisp characterization of the (order-)optimal trade-off between redundancy and reliability has various useful operational consequences. Further, we analyze the robustness of our approach in the presence of adversarial workers and provide a bound on their influence on the redundancy-accuracy trade-off.
Unlike recent prior work [GKM11, KOS11, KOS11], our result applies to non-binary (i.e. K>2) tasks. In effect, we utilize algorithms for binary tasks (with inhomogeneous error model unlike that in [GKM11, KOS11, KOS11]) as key subroutine to obtain answers for K-ary tasks. Technically, the algorithm is based on low-rank approximation of weighted adjacency matrix for a random regular bipartite graph, weighted according to the answers provided by the workers.National Science Foundation (U.S.
Gradient descent for sparse rank-one matrix completion for crowd-sourced aggregation of sparsely interacting workers
We consider worker skill estimation for the singlecoin
Dawid-Skene crowdsourcing model. In
practice skill-estimation is challenging because
worker assignments are sparse and irregular due
to the arbitrary, and uncontrolled availability of
workers. We formulate skill estimation as a
rank-one correlation-matrix completion problem,
where the observed components correspond to
observed label correlation between workers. We
show that the correlation matrix can be successfully
recovered and skills identifiable if and only
if the sampling matrix (observed components) is
irreducible and aperiodic. We then propose an
efficient gradient descent scheme and show that
skill estimates converges to the desired global optima
for such sampling matrices. Our proof is
original and the results are surprising in light of
the fact that even the weighted rank-one matrix
factorization problem is NP hard in general. Next
we derive sample complexity bounds for the noisy
case in terms of spectral properties of the signless
Laplacian of the sampling matrix. Our proposed
scheme achieves state-of-art performance on a
number of real-world datasets.Published versio
Crowdsourcing with Sparsely Interacting Workers
We consider estimation of worker skills from worker-task interaction data
(with unknown labels) for the single-coin crowd-sourcing binary classification
model in symmetric noise. We define the (worker) interaction graph whose nodes
are workers and an edge between two nodes indicates whether or not the two
workers participated in a common task. We show that skills are asymptotically
identifiable if and only if an appropriate limiting version of the interaction
graph is irreducible and has odd-cycles. We then formulate a weighted rank-one
optimization problem to estimate skills based on observations on an
irreducible, aperiodic interaction graph. We propose a gradient descent scheme
and show that for such interaction graphs estimates converge asymptotically to
the global minimum. We characterize noise robustness of the gradient scheme in
terms of spectral properties of signless Laplacians of the interaction graph.
We then demonstrate that a plug-in estimator based on the estimated skills
achieves state-of-art performance on a number of real-world datasets. Our
results have implications for rank-one matrix completion problem in that
gradient descent can provably recover rank-one matrices based on
off-diagonal observations of a connected graph with a single odd-cycle
Optimal Inference in Crowdsourced Classification via Belief Propagation
Crowdsourcing systems are popular for solving large-scale labelling tasks
with low-paid workers. We study the problem of recovering the true labels from
the possibly erroneous crowdsourced labels under the popular Dawid-Skene model.
To address this inference problem, several algorithms have recently been
proposed, but the best known guarantee is still significantly larger than the
fundamental limit. We close this gap by introducing a tighter lower bound on
the fundamental limit and proving that Belief Propagation (BP) exactly matches
this lower bound. The guaranteed optimality of BP is the strongest in the sense
that it is information-theoretically impossible for any other algorithm to
correctly label a larger fraction of the tasks. Experimental results suggest
that BP is close to optimal for all regimes considered and improves upon
competing state-of-the-art algorithms.Comment: This article is partially based on preliminary results published in
the proceeding of the 33rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML
2016