Learning from Incomplete and Inaccurate Supervision

Abstract

In plenty of real-life tasks, strongly supervised information is hard to obtain, such that there is not sufficient high-quality supervision to make traditional learning approaches succeed. Therefore, weakly supervised learning has drawn considerable attention recently. In this paper, we consider the problem of learning from incomplete and inaccurate supervision, where only a limited subset of training data is labeled but potentially with noise. This setting is challenging and of great importance but rarely studied in the literature. We notice that in many applications, the limited labeled data are usually with one-sided noise. For instance, considering the bug detection task in the software system, the identified buggy codes are indeed with defects whereas the codes that have been checked many times or newly fixed may still have other flaws due to the complexity of the system. We propose a novel method which is able to effectively alleviate the negative influence of one-sided label noise with the help of a vast number of unlabeled data. Excess risk analysis is provided as theoretical justifications on the usefulness of incomplete and one-sided inaccurate supervision. We conduct experiments on synthetic, benchmark datasets, and real-life tasks to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.