Data quantity and quality are crucial factors for data-driven learning methods. In some target problem domains, there are not many data samples available, which could significantly hinder the learning process. While data from similar domains may be leveraged to help through domain adaptation, obtaining high-quality labeled data for those source domains themselves could be difficult or costly. To address such challenges on data insufficiency for classification problem in a target domain, we propose a weak adaptation learning (WAL) approach that leverages unlabeled data from a similar source domain, a low-cost weak annotator that produces labels based on task-specific heuristics, labeling rules, or other methods (albeit with inaccuracy), and a small amount of labeled data in the target domain. Our approach first conducts a theoretical analysis on the error bound of the trained classifier with respect to the data quantity and the performance of the weak annotator, and then introduces a multi-stage weak adaptation learning method to learn an accurate classifier by lowering the error bound. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in learning an accurate classifier with limited labeled data in the target domain and unlabeled data in the source domain.

Neural natural language generation (NLG) and understanding (NLU) models are data-hungry and require massive amounts of annotated data to be competitive. Recent frameworks address this bottleneck with generative models that synthesize weak labels at scale, where a small amount of training labels are expert-curated and the rest of the data is automatically annotated. We follow that approach, by automatically constructing a large-scale weakly-labeled data with a fine-tuned GPT-2, and employ a semi-supervised framework to jointly train the NLG and NLU models. The proposed framework adapts the parameter updates to the models according to the estimated label-quality. On both the E2E and Weather benchmarks, we show that this weakly supervised training paradigm is an effective approach under low resource scenarios and outperforming benchmark systems on both datasets when 100% of training data is used.

Training deep neural networks requires many training samples, but in practice training labels are expensive to obtain and may be of varying quality, as some may be from trusted expert labelers while others might be from heuristics or other sources of weak supervision such as crowd-sourcing. This creates a fundamental quality-versusquantity tradeoff in the learning process. Do we learn from the small amount of high-quality data or the potentially large amount of weakly-labeled data? We argue that if the learner could somehow know and take the label-quality into account when learning the data representation, we could get the best of both worlds. To this end, we introduce "fidelity-weighted learning" (FWL) [9], a semi-supervised student-teacher approach for training deep neural networks using weakly-labeled data. FWL modulates the parameter updates to a student network (trained on the task we care about) on a per-sample basis according to the posterior confidence of its label-quality estimated by a teacher (who has access to the high-quality labels). Both student and teacher are learned from the data. We evaluate FWL on document ranking where we outperform state-of-the-art alternative semi-supervised methods.

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 large set of data with weak labels to pretrain a neural network and then fine-tune the parameters with a small amount of data with true labels. This feels intuitively sub-optimal as these two independent stages leave the model unaware about the varying label quality. What if we could somehow inform the model about the label quality? In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised learning method where we train two neural networks in a multi-task fashion: a "target network" and a "confidence network". The target network is optimized to perform a given task and is trained using a large set of unlabeled data that are weakly annotated. We propose to weight the gradient updates to the target network using the scores provided by the second confidence network, which is trained on a small amount of supervised data. Thus we avoid that the weight updates computed from noisy labels harm the quality of the target network model. We evaluate our learning strategy on two different tasks: document ranking and sentiment classification. The results demonstrate that our approach not only enhances the performance compared to the baselines but also speeds up the learning process from weak labels.

In this paper, we propose a method for training neural networks when we have a large set of data with weak labels and a small amount of data with true labels. In our proposed model, we train two neural networks: a target network, the learner and a confidence network, the meta-learner. The target network is optimized to perform a given task and is trained using a large set of unlabeled data that are weakly annotated. We propose to control the magnitude of the gradient updates to the target network using the scores provided by the second confidence network, which is trained on a small amount of supervised data. Thus we avoid that the weight updates computed from noisy labels harm the quality of the target network model.

Semi-supervised learning is proposed to exploit both labeled and unlabeled data. However, as the scale of data in real world applications increases significantly, conventional semi-supervised algorithms usually lead to massive computational cost and cannot be applied to large scale datasets. In addition, label noise is usually present in the practical applications due to human annotation, which very likely results in remarkable degeneration of performance in semi-supervised methods. To address these two challenges, in this paper, we propose an efficient RObust Semi-Supervised Ensemble Learning (ROSSEL) method, which generates pseudo-labels for unlabeled data using a set of weak annotators, and combines them to approximate the ground-truth labels to assist semi-supervised learning. We formulate the weighted combination process as a multiple label kernel learning (MLKL) problem which can be solved efficiently. Compared with other semi-supervised learning algorithms, the proposed method has linear time complexity. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior effectiveness, efficiency and robustness of the proposed algorithm.