Snorkel MeTaL: Weak Supervision for Multi-Task Learning.

Journal: Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Data Management for End-to-End Machine Learning. Workshop on Data Management for End-to-End Machine Learning (2nd : 2018 : Houston, Tex.)
Published Date:

Abstract

Many real-world machine learning problems are challenging to tackle for two reasons: (i) they involve multiple sub-tasks at different levels of granularity; and (ii) they require large volumes of labeled training data. We propose Snorkel MeTaL, an end-to-end system for multi-task learning that leverages supervision provided at by domain expert users. In MeTaL, a user specifies a problem consisting of multiple, hierarchically-related sub-tasks-for example, classifying a document at multiple levels of granularity-and then provides for each sub-task as weak supervision. MeTaL learns a re-weighted model of these labeling functions, and uses the combined signal to train a hierarchical multi-task network which is automatically compiled from the structure of the sub-tasks. Using MeTaL on a radiology report triage task and a fine-grained news classification task, we achieve average gains of 11.2 accuracy points over a baseline supervised approach and 9.5 accuracy points over the predictions of the user-provided labeling functions.

Authors

  • Alex Ratner
    Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
  • Braden Hancock
    Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
  • Jared Dunnmon
    Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
  • Roger Goldman
    Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
  • Christopher Ré
    1Stanford University, Stanford, CA USA.

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