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…
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Crowdsourced labeling recovers task types with minimal queries.
New model optimizes worker-task specialization for crowdsourcing.
Generative AI boosts productivity and improves customer service quality.
The paper aims to explore the impacts of bi-demographic structure on the current account and growth. Using a SVAR modeling, we track the dynamic impacts between these underlying variables. New insights have been developed about the dynamic interrelation between population growth, current account and economic growth. Th…
When recruiting job candidates, employers rarely observe their underlying skill level directly. Instead, they must administer a series of interviews and/or collate other noisy signals in order to estimate the worker's skill. Traditional economics papers address screening models where employers access worker skill via a…
Although freelancing work has grown substantially in recent years, in part facilitated by a number of online labor marketplaces, (e.g., Guru, Freelancer, Amazon Mechanical Turk), traditional forms of "in-sourcing" work continue being the dominant form of employment. This means that, at least for the time being, freelan…
The study uses a multi-armed bandit model to analyze and mitigate hiring discrimination.
Study user engagement in mobile health apps for health workers in resource-poor settings.
As freelancing work keeps on growing almost everywhere due to a sharp decrease in communication costs and to the widespread of Internet-based labour marketplaces (e.g., guru.com, feelancer.com, mturk.com, upwork.com), many researchers and practitioners have started exploring the benefits of outsourcing and crowdsourcin…
Most of the prior work on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) achieves optimal collaboration by directly controlling the agents to maximize a common reward. In this paper, we aim to address this from a different angle. In particular, we consider scenarios where there are self-interested agents (i.e., worker agent…
We discuss the distribution of commuting distances and its relation to income. Using data from Denmark, the UK, and the US, we show that the commuting distance is (i) broadly distributed with a slow decaying tail that can be fitted by a power law with exponent and (ii) an average growing slowly as a power …
An online labor platform faces an online learning problem in matching workers with jobs and using the performance on these jobs to create better future matches. This learning problem is complicated by the rise of complex tasks on these platforms, such as web development and product design, that require a team of worker…
Groups of firms often achieve a competitive advantage through the formation of geo-industrial clusters. Although many exemplary clusters, such as Hollywood or Silicon Valley, have been frequently studied, systematic approaches to identify and analyze the hierarchical structure of the geo-industrial clusters at the glob…
Mobile apps and machine learning improve malaria prevention and treatment.
Optimizes task allocation for financial analysts to balance work efficiency and well-being.
ReSkill reconciles RL skill creation with policy optimization.
Human players in professional team sports achieve high level coordination by dynamically choosing complementary skills and executing primitive actions to perform these skills. As a step toward creating intelligent agents with this capability for fully cooperative multi-agent settings, we propose a two-level hierarchica…
Employers actively look for talents having not only specific hard skills but also various soft skills. To analyze the soft skill demands on the job market, it is important to be able to detect soft skill phrases from job advertisements automatically. However, a naive matching of soft skill phrases can lead to false pos…
Crowdsourcing provides a popular paradigm for data collection at scale. We study the problem of selecting subsets of workers from a given worker pool to maximize the accuracy under a budget constraint. One natural question is whether we should hire as many workers as the budget allows, or restrict on a small number of …
A new algorithm reduces training time for distributed machine learning by dynamically assigning backup workers.
Due to concerns about human error in crowdsourcing, it is standard practice to collect labels for the same data point from multiple internet workers. We here show that the resulting budget can be used more effectively with a flexible worker assignment strategy that asks fewer workers to analyze easy-to-label data and m…
Consider unsupervised clustering of objects drawn from a discrete set, through the use of human intelligence available in crowdsourcing platforms. This paper defines and studies the problem of universal clustering using responses of crowd workers, without knowledge of worker reliability or task difficulty. We model sto…
Study analyzes AI's impact on firms, markets, and workers using large language model data.
Bayesian nonparametrics enables dynamic skill discovery from expert data.
We propose Zeno++, a new robust asynchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent~(SGD) procedure which tolerates Byzantine failures of the workers. In contrast to previous work, Zeno++ removes some unrealistic restrictions on worker-server communications, allowing for fully asynchronous updates from anonymous workers, arbitrar…
Paper learns skill distributions from game outcomes, proving minimax optimality.
We present a novel solution to the problem of simulation-to-real transfer, which builds on recent advances in robot skill decomposition. Rather than focusing on minimizing the simulation-reality gap, we learn a set of diverse policies that are parameterized in a way that makes them easily reusable. This diversity and p…
While training a machine learning model using multiple workers, each of which collects data from their own data sources, it would be most useful when the data collected from different workers can be {\em unique} and {\em different}. Ironically, recent analysis of decentralized parallel stochastic gradient descent (D-PS…
We introduce the Adaptive Skills, Adaptive Partitions (ASAP) framework that (1) learns skills (i.e., temporally extended actions or options) as well as (2) where to apply them. We believe that both (1) and (2) are necessary for a truly general skill learning framework, which is a key building block needed to scale up t…
The number of Italian firms in function of the number of workers is well approximated by an inverse power law up to 15 workers but shows a clear downward deflection beyond this point, both when using old pre-1999 data and when using recent (2014) data. This phenomenon could be associated with employent protection legis…
Deep reinforcement learning has demonstrated increasing capabilities for continuous control problems, including agents that can move with skill and agility through their environment. An open problem in this setting is that of developing good strategies for integrating or merging policies for multiple skills, where each…
The paper explains how language models acquire complex skills through scaling laws and statistical analysis.
DynBRO learns robustly from dynamic Byzantine workers.
In this paper, we focus on approaches to parallelizing stochastic gradient descent (SGD) wherein data is farmed out to a set of workers, the results of which, after a number of updates, are then combined at a central master node. Although such synchronized SGD approaches parallelize well in idealized computing environm…
Researchers study how skills are learned in neural networks using physics principles.
A method to robustly federate learning with non-i.i.d. data and Byzantine workers.
Cost-efficient distributed learning via combinatorial bandits.
Crowdsourcing is a relatively economic and efficient solution to collect annotations from the crowd through online platforms. Answers collected from workers with different expertise may be noisy and unreliable, and the quality of annotated data needs to be further maintained. Various solutions have been attempted to ob…
To accelerate the training of machine learning models, distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants have been widely adopted, which apply multiple workers in parallel to speed up training. Among them, Local SGD has gained much attention due to its lower communication cost. Nevertheless, when the data …
We consider the problem faced by a service platform that needs to match limited supply with demand but also to learn the attributes of new users in order to match them better in the future. We introduce a benchmark model with heterogeneous "workers" (demand) and a limited supply of "jobs" that arrive over time. Job typ…
The paper examines skill estimation and variance under model misspecification in IRT.
Acquiring new robot motor skills is cumbersome, as learning a skill from scratch and without prior knowledge requires the exploration of a large space of motor configurations. Accordingly, for learning a new task, time could be saved by restricting the parameter search space by initializing it with the solution of a si…
Distributed learning techniques such as federated learning have enabled multiple workers to train machine learning models together to reduce the overall training time. However, current distributed training algorithms (centralized or decentralized) suffer from the communication bottleneck on multiple low-bandwidth worke…
Humans are able to perform a myriad of sophisticated tasks by drawing upon skills acquired through prior experience. For autonomous agents to have this capability, they must be able to extract reusable skills from past experience that can be recombined in new ways for subsequent tasks. Furthermore, when controlling com…
ABC method improves subseasonal weather forecasting by 60-90%.
Paper improves communication in distributed optimization, reducing worker-to-server data exchanges.
RelaySum improves decentralized deep learning by uniformly distributing data across workers.