Paper introduces methods for more reliable probabilistic predictions with confidence intervals.
problem Inaccurate labeling of datasets due to unreliable probabilistic predictions from weak labeling functions.
method Proposes a methodology to provide confidence intervals for label probabilities using uncertainty sets of distributions.
result Improves reliability of probabilistic predictions and provides confidence intervals for label probabilities.
Active WeaSuL uses active learning to improve weak supervision for better model performance.
problem Limited labelled data in machine learning.
method Combines active learning with weak supervision to improve probabilistic labels.
result Active WeaSuL outperforms weak supervision and active learning with limited labelled data.
Proposes a constrained labeling method for weakly supervised learning.
problem Combining weak supervision signals while navigating misleading correlations.
method Randomized constrained labeling within a defined space.
result Randomized constrained labeling converges after few iterations and outperforms other methods.
Paper presents a method to train NER models without labelled data using weak supervision.
problem Dealing with NER performance drop in new domains without labelled data.
method Weak supervision through automatic annotation and hidden Markov model integration.
result Improvement of about 7 percentage points in entity-level F1 scores. While there has been much recent progress using deep learning techniques to separate speech and music audio signals, these systems typically require large collections of isolated sources during the training process. When extending audio source separation algorithms to more general domains such as environmental monitori…
Subset selection improves weak supervision performance.
problem Optimizing the use of weakly-labeled data.
method Combining pretrained data representations with the cut statistic for subset selection.
result Subset selection improves weak supervision performance by up to 19%.
Paper develops proper, lower-bounded losses for weakly supervised classification.
problem Weakly supervised classification with corrupted labels.
method Representation theorem for proper losses, derived condition for lower-boundedness, generalized logit squeezing.
result Proper and lower-bounded losses for weak-label learning.
AutoWS-Bench-101 evaluates automated weak supervision methods for diverse domains.
problem Limited applicability of weak supervision due to difficulty in designing labeling functions.
method Automates labeling function design using a small set of ground truth labels.
result AutoWS methods often require foundation models to outperform simple few-shot baselines.
FABLE incorporates instance features into PWS label models for improved performance.
problem Lack of instance features in existing label models limits their performance.
method FABLE uses a mixture of Bayesian label models and a Gaussian Process classifier to incorporate instance features.
result FABLE achieves the highest averaged performance across nine baselines on benchmark datasets.
New research shows label refinement and weak training have limitations for aligning LLMs.
problem Limitations of refinement methods for aligning large language models.
method Analyzed probabilistic assumptions and alternative approaches to label refinement and weak training.
result Label refinement and weak training suffer from irreducible error, leaving a performance gap.
A new method for weakly supervised learning that improves model accuracy.
problem Training machine learning models with precise labels is expensive; weak supervision provides a low-cost alternative.
method Data consistent weak supervision algorithm that searches over classifiers to find plausible labelings, considering features of the training data and estimating labels for low/no coverage data.
result Empirically, the method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art weak supervision methods on text and image classification tasks.
We study generalization properties of weakly supervised learning. That is, learning where only a few "strong" labels (the actual target of our prediction) are present but many more "weak" labels are available. In particular, we show that having access to weak labels can significantly accelerate the learning rate for th…
An active learner is given a hypothesis class, a large set of unlabeled examples and the ability to interactively query labels to an oracle of a subset of these examples; the goal of the learner is to learn a hypothesis in the class that fits the data well by making as few label queries as possible. This work addresses…
Improved multi-class AdaBoost algorithm with stronger weak learnability condition.
problem Multi-class classification problem with at least two labels.
method Recursive ensemble algorithm inspired by SAMME, strengthening weak learnability condition.
result Final hypothesis converges to correct label with probability 1 and generalization error bounds exponentially.
Inspector Gadget uses crowdsourcing and data programming to label industrial images efficiently.
problem Securing enough labeled data for machine learning in industrial settings.
method Combines crowdsourcing, data augmentation, and data programming.
result Obtains better performance than other weak-labeling techniques.
Boosting weak learners to strong ones from aggregate labels is possible for LLP but not for MIL.
problem Boosting weak learners to strong ones from aggregate labels in learning from label proportions (LLP).
method Using a weak learner on large enough bags to obtain a strong learner for small bags in polynomial time.
result Boosting is possible for LLP but not for MIL.
Expands weak supervision by allowing partial labels from multiple noisy sources.
problem Creating models without labeled data using heuristic labelers.
method Probabilistic generative model estimating partial label accuracies.
result Improved model accuracy on various tasks (8.6% on text, comparable to zero-shot methods on images).
ASTRA uses unlabeled data and weak rules to train deep models effectively.
problem Learning with weak supervision rules is challenging due to their heuristic and noisy nature.
method ASTRA framework that considers contextualized representations and pseudo-labels for unlabeled data, and a rule attention network to aggregate labels.
result Significant improvements over state-of-the-art baselines on text classification benchmarks.
Combines foundation models with weak supervision to improve NLP and video tasks.
problem Leveraging weak supervision with foundation models without labeled data.
method Liger, a combination of foundation model embeddings and weak supervision techniques.
result Liger outperforms existing weak supervision methods by 14.1 points on benchmark NLP and video tasks.
Generative models enhance weak supervision for better image classification.
problem Lack of labeled data in supervised learning.
method Fusion of generative adversarial networks and weak supervision.
result Model improves multiclass image classification performance.
Improves label propagation for weakly supervised learning.
problem Reducing the need for labeled data in machine learning.
method Label Propagation with Weak Supervision (LPA) analysis.
result Demonstrated improvements over existing methods on weakly supervised classification tasks.
Unified framework for structured prediction with partial labelling.
problem Learning with partial labelling costs less but is not well studied.
method Structured prediction and infimum loss for a wide range of problems.
result Unified framework leads to explicit algorithms with statistical consistency.
Improves understanding of PWS by calculating influence of sources and data.
problem Understanding the influence of each component in PWS.
method Proposes source-aware Influence Function (IF) to decompose and calculate influence.
result Improves end model's generalization performance and identifies mislabeling.
Unified approach for learning with weak labels across various tasks.
problem Learning with noisy or incomplete labels in diverse machine learning settings.
method Implicit posterior models for joint label inference.
result Unified training objective for various machine learning tasks.
Ensemble techniques are powerful approaches that combine several weak learners to build a stronger one. As a meta learning framework, ensemble techniques can easily be applied to many machine learning techniques. In this paper we propose a neural network extended with an ensemble loss function for text classification. …
New method estimates model performance bounds without ground truth labels.
problem Evaluation of weakly supervised models without direct access to ground truth labels.
method Formulates model evaluation as a partial identification problem and uses Fréchet bounds for performance estimation.
result Derives accurate and computationally efficient bounds for key metrics like accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score.
PLRM synthesizes labels from mismatched sources for better training sets.
problem Creating labeled training sets is a major challenge in machine learning.
method PLRM uses probabilistic modeling to synthesize labels from indirect supervision sources with different output spaces.
result PLRM outperforms baselines by 2%-9% on various tasks.
End-to-end approach for weak supervision improves downstream model performance.
problem Data-labeling bottleneck in machine learning applications.
method Directly learning the downstream model by maximizing its agreement with probabilistic labels generated from weak supervision sources.
result Improved performance over prior work in terms of downstream model performance and robustness.
Paper analyzes weak-to-strong generalization in CNNs, identifying data-scarce and data-abundant regimes.
problem Weak-to-strong generalization in CNNs trained on weak models.
method Formal analysis of gradient descent dynamics in data-scarce and data-abundant regimes.
result Identifies two regimes and distinct mechanisms of generalization in each.
Building a large image dataset with high-quality object masks for semantic segmentation is costly and time consuming. In this paper, we introduce a principled semi-supervised framework that only uses a small set of fully supervised images (having semantic segmentation labels and box labels) and a set of images with onl…
Unified approach for multicalibration in weakly supervised learning.
problem Existing multicalibration methods require clean input-label pairs, which are unavailable in weakly supervised learning.
method Developed estimators and post-hoc correction methods for multicalibration under weak supervision.
result Unified framework for estimating and correcting multicalibration under weak supervision with finite-sample guarantees.
Paper proposes an algorithm to recover full supervision from weakly labeled data.
problem Machine learning requires expensive data annotation, motivating the use of weak supervision.
method The paper introduces a disambiguation principle and an empirical disambiguation algorithm for partial labelling.
result The algorithm achieves exponential convergence rates under learnability assumptions.
We consider the task of training classifiers without labels. We propose a weakly supervised method---adversarial label learning---that trains classifiers to perform well against an adversary that chooses labels for training data. The weak supervision constrains what labels the adversary can choose. The method therefore…
Since manually labeling training data is slow and expensive, recent industrial and scientific research efforts have turned to weaker or noisier forms of supervision sources. However, existing weak supervision approaches fail to model multi-resolution sources for sequential data, like video, that can assign labels to in…
Mitigates bias in weakly supervised datasets.
problem Bias in weakly supervised datasets.
method Proposes a counterfactual fairness-based technique to mitigate bias.
result Improves accuracy by up to 32% while reducing demographic parity gap by 82.5%.
WeLa-VAE learns interpretable disentangled representations with weak supervision.
problem Learning disentangled representations without strong supervision.
method Variational inference framework with shared latent variables and modified variational lower bound.
result WeLa-VAE learns alternative disentangled representations (polar) from weak labels (distance and angle) without refined supervision.
As machine learning models continue to increase in complexity, collecting large hand-labeled training sets has become one of the biggest roadblocks in practice. Instead, weaker forms of supervision that provide noisier but cheaper labels are often used. However, these weak supervision sources have diverse and unknown a…
Interactive weak supervision learns useful heuristics from user feedback.
problem Creating useful heuristics for large labeled datasets is tedious and subjective.
method Develops an interactive framework for learning heuristics from user feedback.
result Only a few feedback iterations are needed to train models without ground truth labels.
WRENCH benchmarks weak supervision datasets for machine learning.
problem Lack of standardized evaluation for weak supervision datasets.
method Developed a comprehensive benchmark platform WRENCH.
result Demonstrated the efficacy of WRENCH as a benchmark platform.
Training deep neural networks requires massive amounts of training data, but for many tasks only limited labeled data is available. This makes weak supervision attractive, using weak or noisy signals like the output of heuristic methods or user click-through data for training. In a semi-supervised setting, we can use a…
We study learning latent models with multi-instance weak supervision.
problem Learning latent models with multi-instance weak supervision.
method Formulated as multi-instance Partial Label Learning (multi-instance PLL), proposed a necessary and sufficient condition for learnability, derived Rademacher-style error bounds.
result First theoretical study of multi-instance PLL with unknown transition function, aligns with empirical results but highlights scalability issues.
DPBD simplifies labeling functions through interactive demonstrations.
problem Difficulty in writing labeling functions for large-scale labeled training data.
method Data Programming by Demonstration (DPBD) framework using interactive demonstrations.
result Ruler system generates labeling rules more easily and with higher user satisfaction.
DP models misspecify LF dependencies, leading to significant performance errors.
problem Misspecification of LF dependencies in DP models.
method Theoretical bounds and empirical analysis of modeling errors.
result Modeling errors can be substantial, even with sensible LF structures.
New method uses weak labels to create valid confidence sets for predictions.
problem Lack of labeled data in machine learning models.
method Developed a conformal prediction framework to provide valid predictive confidence sets using weakly labeled data.
result New coverage definition allows for tighter and more informative (but valid) confidence sets.
Weakly-supervised learning is a paradigm for alleviating the scarcity of labeled data by leveraging lower-quality but larger-scale supervision signals. While existing work mainly focuses on utilizing a certain type of weak supervision, we present a probabilistic framework, learning from indirect observations, for learn…
Proposes ConstraintMatch for semi-supervised clustering with unconstrained data.
problem Leveraging unconstrained data alongside constraints for clustering models.
method Semi-supervised context with pseudo-constraining and pseudo-labeling mechanisms.
result Demonstrates effectiveness of ConstraintMatch over baselines.
New methods lift weak supervision to structured prediction, providing robustness guarantees.
problem Applying weak supervision techniques to structured prediction problems.
method Introducing pseudo-Euclidean embeddings, tensor decompositions, and invariants for consistent noise rate estimation.
result Generalization guarantees nearly identical to those for models trained on clean data.
The problem of learning from label proportions (LLP) involves training classifiers with weak labels on bags of instances, rather than strong labels on individual instances. The weak labels only contain the label proportion of each bag. The LLP problem is important for many practical applications that only allow label p…