Learning From Incomplete and Inaccurate Supervision

• Published in: IEEE transactions on knowledge and data engineering Vol. 34; no. 12; pp. 5854 - 5868
• Main Authors: Zhang, Zhen-Yu, Zhao, Peng, Jiang, Yuan, Zhou, Zhi-Hua
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.12.2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Cognitive tasks; Computer bugs; Defects; Flaw detection; Noise measurement; noisy label learning; semi-supervised learning; Semisupervised learning; Software; Supervised learning; Supervision; Task analysis; Training data; Weakly supervised learning
• ISSN: 1041-4347; 1558-2191
• DOI: 10.1109/TKDE.2021.3061215

In plenty of real-life tasks, strongly supervised information is hard to obtain, and thus weakly supervised learning has drawn considerable attention recently. This paper investigates the problem of learning from incomplete and inaccurate supervision, where only a limited subset of training data is labeled but potentially with noise. This setting is challenging and of great importance but rarely studied in the literature. We notice that in many applications, the limited labeled data are with certain structures, which paves us a way to design effective methods. Specifically, we observe that labeled data are usually with one-sided noise such as the bug detection task, where the identified buggy codes are indeed with defects, while codes checked many times or newly fixed may still have other flaws. Furthermore, when there occurs two-sided noise in the labeled data, we exploit the class-prior information of unlabeled data, which is typically available in practical tasks. We propose novel approaches for the incomplete and inaccurate supervision learning tasks and effectively alleviate the negative influence of label noise with the help of a vast number of unlabeled data. Both theoretical analysis and extensive experiments justify and validate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.