arXiv research

Deep learning model detects and corrects outliers in crowd-sourced weather data.

Crowd-sourcing is a cheap and popular means of creating training and evaluation datasets for machine learning, however it poses the problem of `truth inference', as individual workers cannot be wholly trusted to provide reliable annotations. Research into models of annotation aggregation attempts to infer a latent `tru…

BUDS balances privacy and utility by shuffling data, achieving strong privacy with minimal loss.

Python models predict stock sentiment for market-beating returns.

This paper considers extractive summarisation in a comparative setting: given two or more document groups (e.g., separated by publication time), the goal is to select a small number of documents that are representative of each group, and also maximally distinguishable from other groups. We formulate a set of new object…

New algorithms find all ε-good arms in stochastic bandits.

The paper tackles ranking experts based on their answers to questions, considering statistical and computational challenges.

In this paper we address a classification problem where two sources of labels with different levels of fidelity are available. Our approach is to combine data from both sources by applying a co-kriging schema on latent functions, which allows the model to account item-dependent labeling discrepancy. We provide an exten…

We evaluated the effectiveness of an automated bird sound identification system in a situation that emulates a realistic, typical application. We trained classification algorithms on a crowd-sourced collection of bird audio recording data and restricted our training methods to be completely free of manual intervention.…

Community moderation drifts towards majority, study finds.

Unintended bias in Machine Learning can manifest as systemic differences in performance for different demographic groups, potentially compounding existing challenges to fairness in society at large. In this paper, we introduce a suite of threshold-agnostic metrics that provide a nuanced view of this unintended bias, by…

Data analysis require a pairwise proximity measure over objects. Recent work has extended this to situations where the distance information between objects is given as comparison results of distances between three objects (triplets). Humans find the comparison tasks much easier than the exact distance computation and s…

A multi-agent system is trialed as a means of crowd-sourcing inexpensive but high quality streams of predictions. Each agent is a microservice embodying statistical models and endowed with economic self-interest. The ability to fork and modify simple agents is granted to a large number of employees in a firm and empiri…

Wide-AdGraph detects ads and trackers using a graph of resource requests.

Study shows noisy data collection in ImageNet leads to biased model performance.

Solving real-world problems, particularly with deep learning, relies on the availability of abundant, quality data. In this paper we develop a novel framework that maximises the utility of time-series datasets that contain only small quantities of expertly-labelled data, larger quantities of weakly (or coarsely) labell…

The paper investigates how data imbalance affects fairness and accuracy in differentially private deep learning.

Acquiring ground truth labels for unlabelled data can be a costly procedure, since it often requires manual labour that is error-prone. Consequently, the available amount of labelled data is increasingly reduced due to the limitations of manual data labelling. It is possible to increase the amount of labelled data samp…

We report the first, to the best of our knowledge, hand-in-hand collaboration between human rights activists and machine learners, leveraging crowd-sourcing to study online abuse against women on Twitter. On a technical front, we carefully curate an unbiased yet low-variance dataset of labeled tweets, analyze it to acc…

World wide road traffic fatality and accident rates are high, and this is true even in technologically advanced countries like the USA. Despite the advances in Intelligent Transportation Systems, safe transportation routing i.e., finding safest routes is largely an overlooked paradigm. In recent years, large amount of …

Noisy labeled data is more a norm than a rarity for crowd sourced contents. It is effective to distill noise and infer correct labels through aggregation results from crowd workers. To ensure the time relevance and overcome slow responses of workers, online label aggregation is increasingly requested, calling for solut…

Recognizing a hotel from an image of a hotel room is important for human trafficking investigations. Images directly link victims to places and can help verify where victims have been trafficked, and where their traffickers might move them or others in the future. Recognizing the hotel from images is challenging becaus…

With the widespread use of machine learning for classification, it becomes increasingly important to be able to use weaker kinds of supervision for tasks in which it is hard to obtain standard labeled data. One such kind of supervision is provided pairwise---in the form of Similar (S) pairs (if two examples belong to t…

Many post-disaster and -conflict regions do not have sufficient data on their transportation infrastructure assets, hindering both mobility and reconstruction. In particular, as the number of aging and deteriorating bridges increase, it is necessary to quantify their load characteristics in order to inform maintenance …

In a standard multi-output classification scenario, both features and labels of training data are partially observed. This challenging issue is widely witnessed due to sensor or database failures, crowd-sourcing and noisy communication channels in industrial data analytic services. Classic methods for handling multi-ou…

Emerging technologies and applications including Internet of Things (IoT), social networking, and crowd-sourcing generate large amounts of data at the network edge. Machine learning models are often built from the collected data, to enable the detection, classification, and prediction of future events. Due to bandwidth…

This paper describes and evaluates the use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for path planning in support of smart mobility applications such as indoor and outdoor navigation applications, individualized wayfinding for people with disabilities (e.g., vision impairments, physical disabilities, etc.), path planni…

We define the intrinsic scale at which a network begins to reveal its identity as the scale at which subgraphs in the network (created by a random walk) are distinguishable from similar sized subgraphs in a perturbed copy of the network. We conduct an extensive study of intrinsic scale for several networks, ranging fro…

Regression problems assume every instance is annotated (labeled) with a real value, a form of annotation we call \emph{strong guidance}. In order for these annotations to be accurate, they must be the result of a precise experiment or measurement. However, in some cases additional \emph{weak guidance} might be given by…

We consider the problem of learning the nearest neighbor graph of a dataset of n items. The metric is unknown, but we can query an oracle to obtain a noisy estimate of the distance between any pair of items. This framework applies to problem domains where one wants to learn people's preferences from responses commonly …

LLMs overestimate stock returns and are less accurate at predicting extreme outcomes.

Hölder-DPO aligns models robustly with noisy human feedback.

Model predicts political ideology using context vectors to mitigate bias and scarcity.

Mosquitoes are the only known vector of malaria, which leads to hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Understanding the number and location of potential mosquito vectors is of paramount importance to aid the reduction of malaria transmission cases. In recent years, deep learning has become widely used for bioacous…

When the residents of Flint learned that lead had contaminated their water system, the local government made water-testing kits available to them free of charge. The city government published the results of these tests, creating a valuable dataset that is key to understanding the causes and extent of the lead contamina…

Deep neural networks (DNN) are able to successfully process and classify speech utterances. However, understanding the reason behind a classification by DNN is difficult. One such debugging method used with image classification DNNs is activation maximization, which generates example-images that are classified as one o…

Yelp has been one of the most popular local service search engine in US since 2004. It is powered by crowd-sourced text reviews and photo reviews. Restaurant customers and business owners upload photo images to Yelp, including reviewing or advertising either food, drinks, or inside and outside decorations. It is obviou…

Wisdom of the crowd, the collective intelligence derived from responses of multiple human or machine individuals to the same questions, can be more accurate than each individual, and improve social decision-making and prediction accuracy. This can also integrate multiple programs or datasets, each as an individual, for…

We consider worker skill estimation for the single-coin 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 completi…

Developing countries suffer from traffic congestion, poorly planned road/rail networks, and lack of access to public transportation facilities. This context results in an increase in fuel consumption, pollution level, monetary losses, massive delays, and less productivity. On the other hand, it has a negative impact on…

Foot-mounted inertial positioning (FMIP) can face problems of inertial drifts and unknown initial states in real applications, which renders the estimated trajectories inaccurate and not obtained in a well defined coordinate system for matching trajectories of different users. In this paper, an approach adopting receiv…

In this paper, we extend the persona-based sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) neural network conversation model to a multi-turn dialogue scenario by modifying the state-of-the-art hredGAN architecture to simultaneously capture utterance attributes such as speaker identity, dialogue topic, speaker sentiments and so on. The …

New bounds on majority voting's accuracy for multi-class classification problems.

Most work in machine reading focuses on question answering problems where the answer is directly expressed in the text to read. However, many real-world question answering problems require the reading of text not because it contains the literal answer, but because it contains a recipe to derive an answer together with …

We study the problem of learning a distribution from samples, when the underlying distribution is a mixture of product distributions over discrete domains. This problem is motivated by several practical applications such as crowd-sourcing, recommendation systems, and learning Boolean functions. The existing solutions e…

Study evaluates fairness of machine learning models on Kaggle and finds some optimization techniques can induce unfairness.

We consider the problem of identifying any $k$ out of the best $m$ arms in an $n$-armed stochastic multi-armed bandit. Framed in the PAC setting, this particular problem generalises both the problem of `best subset selection' and that of selecting `one out of the best m' arms [arcsk 2017]. In applications such as crowd…

Big data sets must be carefully partitioned into statistically similar data subsets that can be used as representative samples for big data analysis tasks. In this paper, we propose the random sample partition (RSP) data model to represent a big data set as a set of non-overlapping data subsets, called RSP data blocks,…