Deep Learning from Crowds
Open accessAbstract
Over the last few years, deep learning has revolutionized the field of machine learning by dramatically improving the state-of-the-art in various domains. However, as the size of supervised artificial neural networks grows, typically so does the need for larger labeled datasets. Recently, crowdsourcing has established itself as an efficient and cost-effective solution for labeling large sets of data in a scalable manner, but it often requires aggregating labels from multiple noisy contributors with different levels of expertise. In this paper, we address the problem of learning deep neural networks from crowds. We begin by describing an EM algorithm for jointly learning the parameters of the network and the reliabilities of the annotators. Then, a novel general-purpose crowd layer is proposed, which allows us to train deep neural networks end-to-end, directly from the noisy labels of multiple annotators, using only backpropagation. We empirically show that the proposed approach is able to internally capture the reliability and biases of different annotators and achieve new state-of-the-art results for various crowdsourced datasets across different settings, namely classification, regression and sequence labeling.
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Crowdlayer predicts a context-dependent distribution P(c|X) using a neural context encoder.
“Crowdlayer predicts a context-dependent distribution P (c n |X n ) using a neural context encoder.”
From SkillAggregation: Reference-free LLM-Dependent Aggregation (2025) · cites this paper as Rodrigues and Pereira, 2018
The Crowd layer section (p. 3) says a neural network’s softmax output gives the probability that an input belongs to class c. It does not describe c as a context variable or identify a neural context encoder; the crowd layer instead maps those class probabilities to annotator-specific label outputs. (LLM, conf=0.84)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredSkillAggregation extends the Crowdlayer aggregation method to exploit judge estimates during inference.
“It extends the Crowdlayer aggregation method, developed for image classification, to exploit the judge estimates during inference.”
From SkillAggregation: Reference-free LLM-Dependent Aggregation (2025) · cites this paper as Rodrigues and Pereira, 2018
The Crowdlayer method performs inference by directly selecting the class with the highest probability from the bottleneck output s_n without utilizing worker predictions.
“The Crowdlayer method performs inference by directly selecting the class with the highest probability from the bottleneck output s n without utilizing worker predictions.”
From SkillAggregation: Reference-free LLM-Dependent Aggregation (2025) · cites this paper as Rodrigues and Pereira, 2018
SkillAggregation is based on a reformulation of Crowdlayer.
“We propose SkillAggregation, an aggregation method based on a reformulation of Crowdlayer (Rodrigues and Pereira, 2018).”
From SkillAggregation: Reference-free LLM-Dependent Aggregation (2025) · cites this paper as Rodrigues and Pereira, 2018
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Sorted by citations
Self-supervised learning for videos: A survey
Schiappa, M. C., Rawat, Y. S., & Shah, M. (2023) · ACM Computing Surveys · doi:10.1145/3577925 · Cited by 155 · see citing works
SkillAggregation: Reference-free LLM-Dependent Aggregation
Sun, G., Kagrecha, A., Manakul, P., Woodland, P., & Gales, M. (2025) · Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.756 · Cited by 3 · see citing works
- Authors
- Rodrigues, F., & Pereira, F.
- Affiliations
- Technical University of Denmark (DK)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
- Published
- 2018-04-25
- Volume
- 32
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 1611-1618
- ISSN
- 2159-5399 (ISSN-L)
- 2374-3468
- OpenAlex
- W2750671411
- Cited by
- 10
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2021: 2 · 2019: 3 · 2018: 3
- FWCI
- 2.25
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- diamond
- doi.org
- Locations
- Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (publishedVersion)
- arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- Technical University of Denmark, DTU Orbit (Technical University of Denmark, DTU) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Funders
- European Commission (H2020-MSCA-IF-2016, 2007–2013, FP7 2007-2013, HORIZON2020, H2020, 609405, 745673, FP7/2007, H2020‐MSCA‐IF, H2020-MSCA)
- Horizon 2020 Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013, MSCA-IF-2016, H2020-MSCA, 609405, H2020-MSCA-IF-2016)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Science Applications › Mobile Crowdsensing and Crowdsourcing
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Machine Learning and Data Classification
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Machine Learning and Algorithms
- Keywords
- crowdsourcing, label noise, deep neural network, annotator reliability, expectation-maximization algorithm, end-to-end learning, label aggregation, annotator bias, sequence labeling, regression analysis, classification
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