Generating large labeled training data is becoming the biggest bottleneck in
building and deploying supervised machine learning models. Recently, the data
programming paradigm has been proposed to reduce the human cost in labeling
training data. However, data programming relies on designing labeling functions
which still requires significant domain expertise. Also, it is prohibitively
difficult to write labeling functions for image datasets as it is hard to
express domain knowledge using raw features for images (pixels).
We propose affinity coding, a new domain-agnostic paradigm for automated
training data labeling. The core premise of affinity coding is that the
affinity scores of instance pairs belonging to the same class on average should
be higher than those of pairs belonging to different classes, according to some
affinity functions. We build the GOGGLES system that implements affinity coding
for labeling image datasets by designing a novel set of reusable affinity
functions for images, and propose a novel hierarchical generative model for
class inference using a small development set.
We compare GOGGLES with existing data programming systems on 5 image labeling
tasks from diverse domains. GOGGLES achieves labeling accuracies ranging from a
minimum of 71% to a maximum of 98% without requiring any extensive human
annotation. In terms of end-to-end performance, GOGGLES outperforms the
state-of-the-art data programming system Snuba by 21% and a state-of-the-art
few-shot learning technique by 5%, and is only 7% away from the fully
supervised upper bound.Comment: Published at 2020 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management
of Dat