skip to main content


This content will become publicly available on July 1, 2024

Title: Optimal Budget Allocation for Crowdsourcing Labels for Graphs
Crowdsourcing is an effective and efficient paradigm for obtaining labels for unlabeled corpus employing crowd workers. This work considers the budget allocation problem for a generalized setting on a graph of instances to be labeled where edges encode instance dependencies. Specifically, given a graph and a labeling budget, we propose an optimal policy to allocate the budget among the instances to maximize the overall labeling accuracy. We formulate the problem as a Bayesian Markov Decision Process (MDP), where we define our task as an optimization problem that maximizes the overall label accuracy under budget constraints. Then, we propose a novel stage-wise reward function that considers the effect of worker labels on the whole graph at each timestamp. This reward function is utilized to find an optimal policy for the optimization problem. Theoretically, we show that our proposed policies are consistent when the budget is infinite. We conduct extensive experiments on five real-world graph datasets and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed policies to achieve a higher label accuracy under budget constraints.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1909879
NSF-PAR ID:
10436387
Author(s) / Creator(s):
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Thirty-Ninth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI)
Volume:
216
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1154--1163
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Crowdsourcing is an effective and efficient paradigm for obtaining labels for unlabeled corpus employing crowd workers. This work considers the budget allocation problem for a generalized setting on a graph of instances to be labeled where edges encode instance dependencies. Specifically, given a graph and a labeling budget, we propose an optimal policy to allocate the budget among the instances to maximize the overall labeling accuracy. We formulate the problem as a Bayesian Markov Decision Process (MDP), where we define our task as an optimization problem that maximizes the overall label accuracy under budget constraints. Then, we propose a novel stage-wise reward function that considers the effect of worker labels on the whole graph at each timestamp. This reward function is utilized to find an optimal policy for the optimization problem. Theoretically, we show that our proposed policies are consistent when the budget is infinite. We conduct extensive experiments on five real-world graph datasets and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed policies to achieve a higher label accuracy under budget constraints. 
    more » « less
  2. Evans, Robin J. ; Shpitser, Ilya (Ed.)
    Crowdsourcing is an effective and efficient paradigm for obtaining labels for unlabeled corpus employing crowd workers. This work considers the budget allocation problem for a generalized setting on a graph of instances to be labeled where edges encode instance dependencies. Specifically, given a graph and a labeling budget, we propose an optimal policy to allocate the budget among the instances to maximize the overall labeling accuracy. We formulate the problem as a Bayesian Markov Decision Process (MDP), where we define our task as an optimization problem that maximizes the overall label accuracy under budget constraints. Then, we propose a novel stage-wise reward function that considers the effect of worker labels on the whole graph at each timestamp. This reward function is utilized to find an optimal policy for the optimization problem. Theoretically, we show that our proposed policies are consistent when the budget is infinite. We conduct extensive experiments on five real-world graph datasets and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed policies to achieve a higher label accuracy under budget constraints. 
    more » « less
  3. null (Ed.)
    Recent years have witnessed a growing body of research on autonomous activity recognition models for use in deployment of mobile systems in new settings such as when a wearable system is adopted by a new user. Current research, however, lacks comprehensive frameworks for transfer learning. Specifically, it lacks the ability to deal with partially available data in new settings. To address these limitations, we propose {\it OptiMapper}, a novel uninformed cross-subject transfer learning framework for activity recognition. OptiMapper is a combinatorial optimization framework that extracts abstract knowledge across subjects and utilizes this knowledge for developing a personalized and accurate activity recognition model in new subjects. To this end, a novel community-detection-based clustering of unlabeled data is proposed that uses the target user data to construct a network of unannotated sensor observations. The clusters of these target observations are then mapped onto the source clusters using a complete bipartite graph model. In the next step, the mapped labels are conditionally fused with the prediction of a base learner to create a personalized and labeled training dataset for the target user. We present two instantiations of OptiMapper. The first instantiation, which is applicable for transfer learning across domains with identical activity labels, performs a one-to-one bipartite mapping between clusters of the source and target users. The second instantiation performs optimal many-to-one mapping between the source clusters and those of the target. The many-to-one mapping allows us to find an optimal mapping even when the target dataset does not contain sufficient instances of all activity classes. We show that this type of cross-domain mapping can be formulated as a transportation problem and solved optimally. We evaluate our transfer learning techniques on several activity recognition datasets. Our results show that the proposed community detection approach can achieve, on average, 69%$ utilization of the datasets for clustering with an overall clustering accuracy of 87.5%. Our results also suggest that the proposed transfer learning algorithms can achieve up to 22.5% improvement in the activity recognition accuracy, compared to the state-of-the-art techniques. The experimental results also demonstrate high and sustained performance even in presence of partial data. 
    more » « less
  4. Machine learning models are bounded by the credibility of ground truth data used for both training and testing. Regardless of the problem domain, this ground truth annotation is objectively manual and tedious as it needs considerable amount of human intervention. With the advent of Active Learning with multiple annotators, the burden can be somewhat mitigated by actively acquiring labels of most informative data instances. However, multiple annotators with varying degrees of expertise poses new set of challenges in terms of quality of the label received and availability of the annotator. Due to limited amount of ground truth information addressing the variabilities of Activity of Daily Living (ADLs), activity recognition models using wearable and mobile devices are still not robust enough for real-world deployment. In this paper, we propose an active learning combined deep model which updates its network parameters based on the optimization of a joint loss function. We then propose a novel annotator selection model by exploiting the relationships among the users while considering their heterogeneity with respect to their expertise, physical and spatial context. Our proposed model leverages model-free deep reinforcement learning in a partially observable environment setting to capture the actionreward interaction among multiple annotators. Our experiments in real-world settings exhibit that our active deep model converges to optimal accuracy with fewer labeled instances and achieves 8% improvement in accuracy in fewer iterations. 
    more » « less
  5. null (Ed.)
    This paper considers fair probabilistic classification where the outputs of primary interest are predicted probabilities, commonly referred to as scores. We formulate the problem of transforming scores to satisfy fairness constraints while minimizing the loss in utility. The formulation can be applied either to post-process classifier outputs or to pre-process training data, thus allowing maximum freedom in selecting a classification algorithm. We derive a closed-form expression for the optimal transformed scores and a convex optimization problem for the transformation parameters. In the population limit, the transformed score function is the fairness-constrained minimizer of cross-entropy with respect to the optimal unconstrained scores. In the finite sample setting, we propose to approach this solution using a combination of standard probabilistic classifiers and ADMM. Comprehensive experiments comparing to 10 existing methods show that the proposed FairScoreTransformer has advantages for score-based metrics such as Brier score and AUC while remaining competitive for binary label-based metrics such as accuracy. 
    more » « less