Weak Supervision: A New Programming Paradigm for Machine Learning

In recent years, the real-world impact of machine learning (ML) has grown in leaps and bounds. In large part, this is due to the advent of deep learning models, which allow practitioners to get state-of-the-art scores on benchmark datasets without any hand-engineered features. Given the availability of multiple open-source ML frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch, and an abundance of available state-of-the-art models, it can be argued that high-quality ML models are almost a commoditized resource now. There is a hidden catch, however: the reliance of these models on massive sets of hand-labeled training data. These hand-labeled training sets are expensive and time-consuming to create -- often requiring person-months or years to assemble, clean, and debug -- especially when domain expertise is required.