Energy Efficient Wireless Crowd Labeling: Joint Annotator Clustering and Power Control

Abstract

The unprecedented growth of mobile data traffic has fueled the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) at the network edge, while distilling the intelligence from raw data by machine learning requires tremendous labelling effort. To overcome this challenge, wireless crowd labelling (WCL) is proposed for efficient data labelling by exploiting billions of available mobile annotators and the multicasting property of wireless channels. A WCL system is considered in this paper where unlabelled data (objects) are multicast via fading channels to different clusters of annotators for repetition labelling to improve the accuracy. Given the desired labelling accuracy, the superposition coding technique together with the repetition labelling scheme give rise to a new tradeoff between radio-and-annotator resource consumption. Building on such tradeoff, the annotator clustering and transmit power control are jointly optimized to maximize the labelling throughput (i.e., the number of labelled objects) or minimize the power consumption, resulting in NP-hard integer programming problems. To solve these problems, the optimal structure of annotator clustering is derived by exploiting the property that the power allocation for multicasting objects tends to compensate for the worst channel among the annotators in each cluster. Based on such structure, the throughput maximization problem can be recognized as a longest-path problem and solved by means of branch-and-bound, while the power minimization problem can be recasted to a shortest-path problem and solved by means of forward dynamic programming. The solution approaches can be further simplified when the channels are symmetric by merging the same nodes and cutting the identical paths in the path graph. In addition, exact polices are derived for the special cases where either the annotators or power are constrained. Last, simulation results are presented to demonstrate the performance of our proposed joint designs.