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Theory/Active Learning and Interactive Learning

Ayush Sekhari, Karthik Sridharan, Wen Sun, Runzhe Wu

We consider the problem of Imitation Learning (IL) by actively querying noisy expert for feedback. While imitation learning has been empirically successful, much of prior work assumes access to noiseless expert feedback which is not practical in many applications. In fact, when one only has access to noisy expert feedback, algorithms that rely on purely offline data (non-interactive IL) can be shown to need a prohibitively large number of samples to be successful. In contrast, in this work, we provide an interactive algorithm for IL that uses selective sampling to actively query the noisy expert for feedback. Our contributions are twofold: First, we provide a new selective sampling algorithm that works with general function classes and multiple actions, and obtains the best-known bounds for the regret and the number of queries. Next, we extend this analysis to the problem of IL with noisy expert feedback and provide a new IL algorithm that makes limited queries. Our algorithm for selective sampling leverages function approximation, and relies on an online regression oracle w.r.t.~the given model class to predict actions, and to decide whether to query the expert for its label. On the theoretical side, the regret bound of our algorithm is upper bounded by the regret of the online regression oracle, while the query complexity additionally depends on the eluder dimension of the model class. We complement this with a lower bound that demonstrates that our results are tight. We extend our selective sampling algorithm for IL with general function approximation and provide bounds on both the regret and the number of queries made to the noisy expert. A key novelty here is that our regret and query complexity bounds only depend on the number of times the optimal policy (and not the noisy expert, or the learner) go to states that have a small margin.

Theory/Active Learning and Interactive Learning

Dayou Yu, Weishi Shi, Qi Yu

In active learning (AL), we focus on reducing the data annotation cost from the model training perspective. However, "testing'', which often refers to the model evaluation process of using empirical risk to estimate the intractable true generalization risk, also requires data annotations. The annotation cost for "testing'' (model evaluation) is under-explored. Even in works that study active model evaluation or active testing (AT), the learning and testing ends are disconnected. In this paper, we propose a novel active testing while learning (ATL) framework that integrates active learning with active testing. ATL provides an unbiased sample-efficient estimation of the model risk during active learning. It leverages test samples annotated from different periods of a dynamic active learning process to achieve fair model evaluations based on a theoretically guaranteed optimal integration of different test samples. Periodic testing also enables effective early-stopping to further save the total annotation cost. ATL further integrates an "active feedback'' mechanism, which is inspired by human learning, where the teacher (active tester) provides immediate guidance given by the prior performance of the student (active learner). Our theoretical result reveals that active feedback maintains the label complexity of the integrated learning-testing objective, while improving the model's generalization capability. We study the realistic setting where we maximize the performance gain from choosing "testing'' samples for feedback without sacrificing the risk estimation accuracy. An agnostic-style analysis and empirical evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate that the ATL framework can effectively improve the annotation efficiency of both active learning and evaluation tasks.

Theory/Active Learning and Interactive Learning

Sehyun Hwang, Sohyun Lee, Hoyoung Kim, Minhyeon Oh, Jungseul Ok, Suha Kwak

This paper proposes a new active learning method for semantic segmentation. The core of our method lies in a new annotation query design. It samples informative local image regions ($\textit{e.g.}$, superpixels), and for each of such regions, asks an oracle for a multi-hot vector indicating all classes existing in the region. This multi-class labeling strategy is substantially more efficient than existing ones like segmentation, polygon, and even dominant class labeling in terms of annotation time per click. However, it introduces the class ambiguity issue in training as it assigns partial labels ($\textit{i.e.}$, a set of candidate classes) to individual pixels. We thus propose a new algorithm for learning semantic segmentation while disambiguating the partial labels in two stages. In the first stage, it trains a segmentation model directly with the partial labels through two new loss functions motivated by partial label learning and multiple instance learning. In the second stage, it disambiguates the partial labels by generating pixel-wise pseudo labels, which are used for supervised learning of the model. Equipped with a new acquisition function dedicated to the multi-class labeling, our method outperforms previous work on Cityscapes and PASCAL VOC 2012 while spending less annotation cost. Our code and results are available at [https://github.com/sehyun03/MulActSeg](https://github.com/sehyun03/MulActSeg).

Theory/Active Learning and Interactive Learning

Yihan Zhou, Eric Price

For some hypothesis classes and input distributions, \emph{active} agnostic learning needs exponentially fewer samples than passive learning; for other classes and distributions, it offers little to no improvement. The most popular algorithms for agnostic active learning express their performance in terms of a parameter called the disagreement coefficient, but it is known that these algorithms are inefficient on some inputs. We take a different approach to agnostic active learning, getting an algorithm that is \emph{competitive} with the optimal algorithm for any binary hypothesis class $H$ and distribution $\mathcal{D}_X$ over $X$. In particular, if any algorithm can use $m^*$ queries to get $O(\eta)$ error, then our algorithm uses $O(m^* \log H)$ queries to get $O(\eta)$ error. Our algorithm lies in the vein of the splitting-based approach of Dasgupta [2004], which gets a similar result for the realizable ($\eta = 0$) setting. We also show that it is NP-hard to do better than our algorithm's $O(\log H)$ overhead in general.

Theory/Active Learning and Interactive Learning

Leonidas Tsepenekas, Ivan Brugere, Freddy Lecue, Daniele Magazzeni

Similarity functions measure how comparable pairs of elements are, and play a key role in a wide variety of applications, e.g., notions of Individual Fairness abiding by the seminal paradigm of Dwork et al., as well as Clustering problems. However, access to an accurate similarity function should not always be considered guaranteed, and this point was even raised by Dwork et al. For instance, it is reasonable to assume that when the elements to be compared are produced by different distributions, or in other words belong to different ``demographic'' groups, knowledge of their true similarity might be very difficult to obtain. In this work, we present an efficient sampling framework that learns these across-groups similarity functions, using only a limited amount of experts' feedback. We show analytical results with rigorous theoretical bounds, and empirically validate our algorithms via a large suite of experiments.

Theory/Active Learning and Interactive Learning

Yifang Chen, Yingbing Huang, Simon Du, Kevin Jamieson, Guanya Shi

Representation learning based on multi-task pretraining has become a powerful approach in many domains. In particular, task-aware representation learning aims to learn an optimal representation for a specific target task by sampling data from a set of source tasks, while task-agnostic representation learning seeks to learn a universal representation for a class of tasks. In this paper, we propose a general and versatile algorithmic and theoretic framework for \emph{active representation learning}, where the learner optimally chooses which source tasks to sample from. This framework, along with a tractable meta algorithm, allows most arbitrary target and source task spaces (from discrete to continuous), covers both task-aware and task-agnostic settings, and is compatible with deep representation learning practices. We provide several instantiations under this framework, from bilinear and feature-based nonlinear to general nonlinear cases. In the bilinear case, by leveraging the non-uniform spectrum of the task representation and the calibrated source-target relevance, we prove that the sample complexity to achieve $\varepsilon$-excess risk on target scales with $(k^*)^2 ||v^*||_2^2 \varepsilon^{-2}$ where $k^*$ is the effective dimension of the target and $||v^*||_2^2 \in (0,1]$ represents the connection between source and target space. Compared to the passive one, this can save up to $\frac{1}{d_W}$ of sample complexity, where $d_W$ is the task space dimension. Finally, we demonstrate different instantiations of our meta algorithm in synthetic datasets and robotics problems, from pendulum simulations to real-world drone flight datasets. On average, our algorithms outperform baselines by 20%-70%.

Theory/Active Learning and Interactive Learning

Chen Zhang, Xiaofeng Cao, Weiyang Liu, Ivor Tsang, James Kwok

We study the problem of teaching multiple learners simultaneously in the nonparametric iterative teaching setting, where the teacher iteratively provides examples to the learner for accelerating the acquisition of a target concept. This problem is motivated by the gap between current single-learner teaching setting and the real-world scenario of human instruction where a teacher typically imparts knowledge to multiple students. Under the new problem formulation, we introduce a novel framework -- Multi-learner Nonparametric Teaching (MINT). In MINT, the teacher aims to instruct multiple learners, with each learner focusing on learning a scalar-valued target model. To achieve this, we frame the problem as teaching a vector-valued target model and extend the target model space from a scalar-valued reproducing kernel Hilbert space used in single-learner scenarios to a vector-valued space. Furthermore, we demonstrate that MINT offers significant teaching speed-up over repeated single-learner teaching, particularly when the multiple learners can communicate with each other. Lastly, we conduct extensive experiments to validate the practicality and efficiency of MINT.

Theory/Active Learning and Interactive Learning

Christian Lange, Elijah Cole, Grant Van Horn, Oisin Mac Aodha

We propose a new active learning approach for efficiently estimating the geographic range of a species from a limited number of on the ground observations. We model the range of an unmapped species of interest as the weighted combination of estimated ranges obtained from a set of different species. We show that it is possible to generate this candidate set of ranges by using models that have been trained on large weakly supervised community collected observation data. From this, we develop a new active querying approach that sequentially selects geographic locations to visit that best reduce our uncertainty over an unmapped species’ range. We conduct a detailed evaluation of our approach and compare it to existing active learning methods using an evaluation dataset containing expert-derived ranges for one thousand species. Our results demonstrate that our method outperforms alternative active learning methods and approaches the performance of end-to-end trained models, even when only using a fraction of the data. This highlights the utility of active learning via transfer learned spatial representations for species range estimation. It also emphasizes the value of leveraging emerging large-scale crowdsourced datasets, not only for modeling a species' range, but also for actively discovering them.

Theory/Active Learning and Interactive Learning

Ayush Sekhari, Karthik Sridharan, Wen Sun, Runzhe Wu

We consider the problem of contextual bandits and imitation learning, where the learner lacks direct knowledge of the executed action's reward. Instead, the learner can actively request the expert at each round to compare two actions and receive noisy preference feedback. The learner's objective is two-fold: to minimize regret associated with the executed actions, while simultaneously, minimizing the number of comparison queries made to the expert. In this paper, we assume that the learner has access to a function class that can represent the expert's preference model under appropriate link functions and present an algorithm that leverages an online regression oracle with respect to this function class. For the contextual bandit setting, our algorithm achieves a regret bound that combines the best of both worlds, scaling as $O(\min\\{\sqrt{T}, d/\Delta\\})$, where $T$ represents the number of interactions, $d$ represents the eluder dimension of the function class, and $\Delta$ represents the minimum preference of the optimal action over any suboptimal action under all contexts. Our algorithm does not require the knowledge of $\Delta$, and the obtained regret bound is comparable to what can be achieved in the standard contextual bandits setting where the learner observes reward signals at each round. Additionally, our algorithm makes only $O(\min\\{T, d^2/\Delta^2\\})$ queries to the expert. We then extend our algorithm to the imitation learning setting, where the agent engages with an unknown environment in episodes of length $H$, and provide similar guarantees regarding regret and query complexity. Interestingly, with preference-based feedback, our imitation learning algorithm can learn a policy outperforming a sub-optimal expert, matching the result from interactive imitation learning algorithms [Ross and Bagnell, 2014] that require access to the expert's actions and also reward signals.

Theory/Active Learning and Interactive Learning

Yang Yang, Yuxuan Zhang, XIN SONG, Yi Xu

Active learning (AL) methods have been proven to be an effective way to reduce the labeling effort by intelligently selecting valuable instances for annotation. Despite their great success with in-distribution (ID) scenarios, AL methods suffer from performance degradation in many real-world applications because out-of-distribution (OOD) instances are always inevitably contained in unlabeled data, which may lead to inefficient sampling. Therefore, several attempts have been explored open-set AL by strategically selecting pure ID instances while filtering OOD instances. However, concentrating solely on selecting pseudo-ID instances may cause the training constraint of the ID classifier and OOD detector. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective sampling scheme, Progressive Active Learning (PAL), which employs a progressive sampling mechanism to leverage the active selection of valuable OOD instances. The proposed PAL measures unlabeled instances by synergistically evaluating instances' informativeness and representativeness, and thus it can balance the pseudo-ID and pseudo-OOD instances in each round to enhance both the capacity of the ID classifier and the OOD detector. %Meanwhile, PAL measures unlabeled instances by synergistically evaluating instances' informativeness and representativeness, which can more effectively estimate the values of instances. Extensive experiments on various open-set AL scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed PAL, compared with the state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/njustkmg/PAL}.

Theory/Active Learning and Interactive Learning

Youguang Chen, George Biros

We investigate theory and algorithms for pool-based active learning for multiclass classification using multinomial logistic regression. Using finite sample analysis, we prove that the Fisher Information Ratio (FIR) lower and upper bounds the excess risk. Based on our theoretical analysis, we propose an active learning algorithm that employs regret minimization to minimize the FIR. To verify our derived excess risk bounds, we conduct experiments on synthetic datasets. Furthermore, we compare FIRAL with five other methods and found that our scheme outperforms them: it consistently produces the smallest classification error in the multiclass logistic regression setting, as demonstrated through experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and 50-class ImageNet.