# Learning to Learn from Weak Supervision by Full Supervision

Our paper "Learning to Learn from Weak Supervision by Full Supervision", with Sascha Rothe, and  Jaap Kamps, has been accepted at NIPS2017 Workshop on Meta-Learning (MetaLearn 2017). \o/

Using weak or noisy supervision is a straightforward approach to increase the size of the training data and it has been shown that the output of heuristic methods can be used as weak or noisy signals along with a small amount of labeled data to train neural networks. This is usually done by pre-training the network on weak data and fine-tuning it with true labels. However, these two independent stages do not leverage the full capacity of information from true labels and using noisy labels of lower quality often brings little to no improvement. This issue is tackled by noise-aware models where denoising the weak signal is part of the learning process.

[latexpage]

We propose a meta-learning approach in which we train two networks: a target network, which plays the role of the learner and it uses a large set of weakly annotated instances to learn the main task, and a confidence network which plays the role of the meta-learner and it is trained on a small human-labeled set to estimate confidence scores. These scores define the magnitude of the weight updates to the target network during the back-propagation phase. The goal of the confidence network trained jointly with the target network is to calibrate the learning rate of the target network for each instance in the batch. I.e., the weights $\pmb{w}$ of the target network $f_w$ at step $t+1$ are updated as follows:

$\pmb{w}_{t+1} = \pmb{w}_t – \frac{\eta_t}{b}\sum_{i=1}^b c_{\theta}(x_i, \tilde{y}_i) \nabla \mathcal{L}(f_{\pmb{w_t}}(x_i), \tilde{y_i}) %+ \nabla \mathcal{R}(\pmb{w_t})$

where $\eta_t$ is the global learning rate, $\mathcal{L}(\cdot)$ is the loss of predicting $\hat{y}=f_w(x_i)$ for an input $x_i$ when the label is $\tilde{y}$; $c_\theta(\cdot)$ is a scoring function learned by the confidence network taking input instance $x_i$ and its noisy label $\tilde{y}_i$. Thus, we can effectively control the contribution to the parameter updates for the target network from weakly labeled instances based on how reliable their labels are according to the confidence network, learned on a small supervised data.

Our setup requires running a weak annotator to label a large amount of unlabeled data, which is done at pre-processing time. For many tasks, it is possible to use a simple heuristic to generate weak labels. This set is then used to train the target network. In contrast, a small human-labeled set is used to train the confidence network.  The general architecture of the model is illustrated in the figure below:

# Avoiding Your Teacher’s Mistakes: Training Neural Networks with Controlled Weak Supervision

This post is about the project I've done in collaboration with Aliaksei Severyn, Sascha Rothe, and Jaap Kamps, during my internship at Google Research.

[latexpage]

Deep neural networks have shown impressive results in a lot of tasks in computer vision, natural language processing, and information retrieval. However, their success is conditioned on the availability of exhaustive amounts of labeled data, while for many tasks such a data is not available.  Hence, unsupervised and semi-supervised methods are becoming increasingly attractive.

Using weak or noisy supervision is a straightforward approach to increase the size of the training data.  In one of my previous post, I’ve talked about how to beat your teacher, which provides an insight on how to train a neural network model using only the output of a heuristic model as supervision signal which eventually works better than that heuristic model. Assuming that most of the time, besides a lot of unlabeled (or weakly labeled) data there is a small amount of training data with strong (true) labels, i.e. a semi-supervised setup, here I’ll talk about how to learn from a weak teacher and avoid his mistakes.

This is usually done by pre-training the network on weak data and fine-tuning it with true labels.  However, these two independent stages do not leverage the full capacity of information from true labels.  For instance, in the pre-training stage, there is no handle to control the extent to which the data with weak labels contribute in the learning process, while they can be of different quality.

In this post, I’m going to talk about our proposed idea which is a semi-supervised method that leverages a small amount of data with true labels along with a large amount of data with weak labels.  Our proposed method has three main components:

• A weak annotator, which can be a heuristic model, a weak classifier, or even human via crowdsourcing and it is employed to annotate massive amount of unlabeled data.
• A target network which uses a large set of weakly annotated instances by weak annotator to learn the main task
• A confidence network which is trained on a small human-labeled set to estimate confidence scores for instances annotated by the weak annotator. We train the target network and confidence in a multi-task fashion.

In a joint learning process, target network and confidence network try to learn a suitable representation of the data and this layer is shared between them as a two-way communication channel.  The target network tries to learn to predict the label of the given input under the supervision of the weak annotator. In the same time, the output of the confidence network, which are the confidence scores, define the magnitude of the weight updates to the target network with respect to the loss computed based on labels from weak annotator, during the back-propagation phase of the target network. This way, the confidence network helps the target network to avoid mistakes of her teacher, i.e.weak annotator, by down-weighting the weight updates from weak labels that do not look reliable to the confidence network.

# UvA at CIKM2017

CIKM2017‘s notifications are out. So there will be nine papers (full/short/demo/workshop) co-authored by our research group at the University of Amsterdam this year.

To make it more convenient for those who are going to attend CIKM this year to follow up on our research, we decided to prepare a list of our contributions. I’ve designed a bookmark for that:

# Toward Document Understanding for Information Retrieval

Document understanding for the purpose of assessing the relevance of a document or passage to a query based only on the document content appears to be a familiar goal for information retrieval community, however, this problem has remained largely intractable, despite repeated attacks over many years.  This is while people are able to assess the relevance quite well, though unfamiliar topics and complex documents can defeat them.  This assessment may require the ability to understand language, images, document structure, videos, audio, and functional elements.  In turn, understanding of these elements is built on background information about the world, such as human behavior patterns, and even more fundamental truths such as the existence of time, space, and people.  All this comes naturally to people, but not to computers!

Recently, large-scale machine learning has altered the landscape.  Deep learning has greatly advanced machine understanding of images and language.  Since document and query understanding incorporate these elements, deep learning can hold great promise.  But it comes with a drawback:  general purpose representations (like CNNs for images) have proved somewhat elusive for text.  In particular, embeddings act as a distributed representation not just of semantic information but also application-specific learnings, which are hard to transfer. In short, conditions seem right for a renewed attempt on the fundamental document understanding problem.

### What is document understanding?

In order to think about the way we can approach this problem, I think we should first answer some questions: Can we understand documents?  What is “understanding”?  Getting at the true meaning of a document?  Okay, but then what is “meaning”?  How do we even approach such an ill-defined goal?

# Learning Useful Document Representations for Search

With the emergence of deep learning, representation learning has been a hot topic in recent years. There are a large variety of approaches to representation learning in general, but the basic idea is to learn some set of features from data and then using these features for some task. Generating representation for documents is still one the key challenges in information retrieval.  In search, the main task is to determine whether a document is relevant to a query or not.  So we want to process the document in order to produce a representation of it that preserves our ability to judge relevance while stripping away nonessential data.

Most of the time, due to efficiency reasons, this is done as a preprocessing stage where we generate query-independent document representation and it has one straightforward motivation: processing documents online would be terribly expensive. Note that this is not to suggest that query-dependent document representations are not useful, for instance, we can train a neural network which predicts the relevance of a query and a document based on words near hits which could be both efficient and effective.

Since deep learning turned to be a tool using which we can renew our attempts for representing documents, it is good to think about this question again that “What does make for useful document representations?“. Of course representations that lead to better results in search are appreciated, but it is not enough. Here, in this write-up, I’m going to shortly talk about some characteristics that I think a useful query-independent document representation for the task of search should possess.

Good representations of documents should ideally satisfy the following properties for maximal utility in information retrieval:

1. Semantic: The representation should be the same or similar even if the text is rewritten in a different manner as long as it has the same meaning. In other words, it should be resilient to paraphrases. (more…)

# Some Highlights of MILA Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning Summer Schools 2017

[latexpage]
A couple weeks a go, I attended MILLA Deep Learning summer school (DLSS) from June 26th to July 1st and Reinforcement Learning summer school (RLSS) from  July 3rd to 5th, 2017, organized by Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville. You can find information about the lectures here. In the following, I will share some of “my” highlights from the summer schools.

## Different types of learning problems

The first day of summer school was on general topics of machine learning and neural networks. Doina Precup gave a talk which was a gentle refreshing of the general concepts of Machine Learning and then Hugo Larochelle covered the basics of neural networks. In the second part of his talk, Hugo started by dividing learning problems into different types, based on the data and settings of the problem during training and inference. Based on his grouping, each learning problem can be classified to one of these categories:

# Learning to Attend, Copy, and Generate for Session-Based Query Suggestion

Our paper "Learning to Attend, Copy, and Generate for Session-Based Query Suggestion", with Sascha Rothe, Enrique Alfonseca, and  Pascal Fleury, has been accepted as a long paper at the international Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'17). This paper is on the outcome of my internship at Google Research. \o/

Users interact with search engines during search sessions and try to direct their search by submitting a sequence of queries. Based on these interactions, search engines provide a prominent feature, in which they assist their users to formulate their queries to better represent their intent during Web search by providing suggestions for the next query.

Query suggestion might address the need for disambiguation of the user queries to make the direction of the search more clear for both, the user and the search engine.
It might help users by providing a precise and succinct query when they are not familiar with the specific terminology or when they lack understanding of the internal vocabulary and structures in order to be able to formulate an effective query. It has been shown that in general, query suggestion accelerates search satisfaction by either diving deeper into the current search direction or by moving to a different aspect of a search task.

# NN4IR’s logo

We’re going to organize the “Neural Networks for Information Retrieval” tutorial at SIGIR2017, Tokyo, Japan. You can read about our tutorial at http://nn4ir.com/.

I’ve tried to design (kind of) a logo  for our tutorial:

Our paper "Share your Model instead of your Data: Privacy Preserving Mimic Learning for Ranking", with Hosein Azarbonyad, Jaap Kamps, and Maarten de Rijke, has been accepted at Neu-IR: SIGIR Workshop on Neural Information Retrieval (NeuIR'17). \o/