Cited by 10Mobile Crowdsensing and CrowdsourcingMachine Learning and Data ClassificationMachine Learning and Algorithms

Deep Learning from Crowds

Open access
Rodrigues, Filipe, Pereira, Francisco·2018·Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

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 measured
  • SkillAggregation 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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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
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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