Sunita Sarawagi Department of CSE IIT Bombay, India sunita@iitb.ac.in Abstract Scarcity of labeled data is a bottleneck for supervised learning models. A paradigm that has evolved for dealing with this problem is data programming. An existing data programming paradigm allows human supervision to be provided as a set of discrete labeling functions (LF) that output possibly noisy labels to input instances and a generative model for consolidating the weak labels. We enhance and generalize this paradigm by supporting functions that output a continuous score (instead of a hard label) that noisily correlates with labels. We show across five applications that continuous LFs are more natural to program and lead to improved recall. We also show that accuracy of existing generative models is unstable with respect to initialization, training epochs, and learning rates. We give control to the data programmer to guide the training process by providing intuitive quality guides with each LF. We propose an elegant method of incorporating these guides into the generative model. Our overall method, called CAGE, makes the data programming paradigm more reliable than other tricks based on initialization, sign-penalties, or soft-accuracy constraints. 1 Introduction Modern machine learning systems require large amounts of labelled data. For many applications, such labelled data is created by getting humans to explicitly label each training example. A problem of perpetual interest in machine learning is reducing the tedium of such human supervision via techniques like active learning, crowd-labeling, distant supervision, and semi-supervised learning.

A BSTRACT We improve the recently-proposed "MixMatch" semi-supervised learning algorithm by introducing two new techniques: distribution alignment and augmentation anchoring. Distribution alignment encourages the marginal distribution of predictions on unlabeled data to be close to the marginal distribution of ground-truth labels. Augmentation anchoring feeds multiple strongly augmented versions of an input into the model and encourages each output to be close to the prediction for a weakly-augmented version of the same input. To produce strong augmentations, we propose a variant of AutoAugment which learns the augmentation policy while the model is being trained. Our new algorithm, dubbed ReMix-Match, is significantly more data-efficient than prior work, requiring between 5 and 16 less data to reach the same accuracy. For example, on CIFAR-10 with 250 labeled examples we reach 93 .73% This can enable the use of large, powerful models when labeling data is expensive or inconvenient. Research on SSL has produced a diverse collection of approaches, including consistency regularization (Sajjadi et al., 2016; Laine & Aila, 2017) which encourages a model to produce the same prediction when the input is perturbed and entropy minimization (Grandvalet & Bengio, 2005) which encourages the model to output high-confidence predictions. The recently proposed "MixMatch" algorithm (Berthelot et al., 2019) combines these techniques in a unified loss function and achieves strong performance on a variety of image classification benchmarks.

Membership inference attacks seek to infer the membership of individual training instances of a privately trained model. This paper presents a membership privacy analysis and evaluation system, called MPLens, with three unique contributions. First, through MPLens, we demonstrate how membership inference attack methods can be leveraged in adversarial machine learning. Second, through MPLens, we highlight how the vulnerability of pre-trained models under membership inference attack is not uniform across all classes, particularly when the training data itself is skewed. We show that risk from membership inference attacks is routinely increased when models use skewed training data. Finally, we investigate the effectiveness of differential privacy as a mitigation technique against membership inference attacks. We discuss the trade-offs of implementing such a mitigation strategy with respect to the model complexity, the learning task complexity, the dataset complexity and the privacy parameter settings. Our empirical results reveal that (1) minority groups within skewed datasets display increased risk for membership inference and (2) differential privacy presents many challenging trade-offs as a mitigation technique to membership inference risk.

Generalized planning aims at computing an algorithm-like structure (generalized plan) that solves a set of multiple planning instances. In this paper we define negative examples for generalized planning as planning instances that must not be solved by a generalized plan. With this regard the paper extends the notion of validation of a generalized plan as the problem of verifying that a given generalized plan solves the set of input positives instances while it fails to solve a given input set of negative examples. This notion of plan validation allows us to define quantitative metrics to asses the generalization capacity of generalized plans. The paper also shows how to incorporate this new notion of plan validation into a compilation for plan synthesis that takes both positive and negative instances as input. Experiments show that incorporating negative examples can accelerate plan synthesis in several domains and leverage quantitative metrics to evaluate the generalization capacity of the synthesized plans.

This post overviews the paper Confident Learning: Estimating Uncertainty in Dataset Labels authored by Curtis G. Northcutt, Lu Jiang, and Isaac L. Chuang. If you've ever used datasets like CIFAR, MNIST, ImageNet, or IMDB, you likely assumed the class labels are correct. Why? Principled approaches for characterizing and finding label errors in massive datasets is challenging and solutions are limited. Surprise: there are likely at least 100,000 label issues in ImageNet. In this post, I discuss an emerging, principled framework to identify label errors, characterize label noise, and learn with noisy labels known as confident learning (CL), open-sourced as the cleanlab Python package.

Often the development of novel materials is not amenable to high-throughput or purely computational screening methods. Instead, materials must be synthesized one at a time in a process that does not generate significant amounts of data. One way this method can be improved is by ensuring that each experiment provides the best improvement in both material properties and predictive modeling accuracy. In this work, we study the effectiveness of active learning, which optimizes the order of experiments, and meta learning, which transfers knowledge from one context to another, to reduce the number of experiments necessary to build a predictive model. We present a novel multi-task benchmark database of peptides designed to advance active, few-shot, and meta-learning methods for experimental design. Each task is binary classification of peptides represented as a sequence string. We show results of standard active learning and meta-learning methods across these datasets to assess their ability to improve predictive models with the fewest number of experiments. We find the ensemble query by committee active learning method to be effective. The meta-learning method Reptile was found to improve accuracy. The robustness of these conclusions were tested across multiple model choices.

Despite the success of supervised machine learning and deep learning, there's a school of thought that says that unsupervised learning has even greater potential. The learning of a supervised learning system is limited by its training; i.e., a supervised learning system can learn only those tasks that it's trained for. By contrast, an unsupervised system could theoretically achieve "artificial general intelligence," meaning the ability to learn any task a human can learn. If the biggest problem with supervised learning is the expense of labeling the training data, the biggest problem with unsupervised learning (where the data is not labeled) is that it often doesn't work very well. Nevertheless, unsupervised learning does have its uses: It can sometimes be good for reducing the dimensionality of a data set, exploring the pattern and structure of the data, finding groups of similar objects, and detecting outliers and other noise in the data.

We discuss the relevance of the recent machine learning (ML) literature for economics and econometrics. First we discuss the differences in goals, methods, and settings between the ML literature and the traditional econometrics and statistics literatures. Then we discuss some specific methods from the ML literature that we view as important for empirical researchers in economics. These include supervised learning methods for regression and classification, unsupervised learning methods, and matrix completion methods. Finally, we highlight newly developed methods at the intersection of ML and econometrics that typically perform better than either off-the-shelf ML or more traditional econometric methods when applied to particular classes of problems, including causal inference for average treatment effects, optimal policy estimation, and estimation of the counterfactual effect of price changes in consumer choice models.

Unsupervised domain adaptation aims to address the problem of classifying unlabeled samples from the target domain whilst labeled samples are only available from the source domain and the data distributions are different in these two domains. As a result, classifiers trained from labeled samples in the source domain suffer from significant performance drop when directly applied to the samples from the target domain. To address this issue, different approaches have been proposed to learn domain-invariant features or domain-specific classifiers. In either case, the lack of labeled samples in the target domain can be an issue which is usually overcome by pseudo-labeling. Inaccurate pseudo-labeling, however, could result in catastrophic error accumulation during learning. In this paper, we propose a novel selective pseudo-labeling strategy based on structured prediction. The idea of structured prediction is inspired by the fact that samples in the target domain are well clustered within the deep feature space so that unsupervised clustering analysis can be used to facilitate accurate pseudo-labeling. Experimental results on four datasets (i.e. Office-Caltech, Office31, ImageCLEF-DA and Office-Home) validate our approach outperforms contemporary state-of-the-art methods.

At Walmart Labs, we utilize meta-learning every day -- whether it's in our robust item catalog or item recommendations. This article will walk through what meta-learning is and how it is being used to solve practical industry problems. Meta-learning is an exciting area of research that tackles the problem of learning to learn. The goal is to design models that can learn new skills or rapidly adapt to new environments with minimal training examples. Not only does this dramatically speed up and improve the design of Machine learning (ML) pipelines or neural architectures, but it also allows us to replace hand-engineered algorithms with novel approaches learned in a data-driven way (Vanschoren, 2018).