New Methods for Learning from Heterogeneous and Strategic Agents

Abstract

1 Introduction In this doctoral thesis, we address several representative problems that arise in the context of learning from multiple heterogeneous agents. These problems are relevant to many modern applications such as crowdsourcing and internet advertising. In scenarios such as crowdsourcing, there is a planner who is interested in learning a task and a set of noisy agents provide the training data for this learning task. Any learning algorithm making use of the data provided by these noisy agents must account for their noise levels. The noise levels of the agents are unknown to the planner, leading to a non-trivial difficulty. Further, the agents are heterogeneous as they differ in terms of their noise levels. A key challenge in such settings is to learn the noise levels of the agents while simultaneously learning the underlying model. Another challenge arises when the agents are strategic. For example, when the agents are required to perform a task, they could be strategic on the efforts they put in. As another example, when required to report their costs incurred towards performing the task, the agents could be strategic and may not report the costs truthfully. In general, the performance of the learning algorithms could be severely affected if the information elicited from the agents is incorrect. We address the above challenges that arise in the following representative learning problems. Multi-label Classification from Heterogeneous Noisy Agents Multi-label classification is a well-known supervised machine learning problem where each instance is associated with multiple classes. Since several labels can be assigned to a single instance, one of the key challenges in this problem is to learn the correlations between the classes. We first assume labels from a perfect source and propose a novel topic model called Multi-Label Presence-Absence Latent Dirichlet Allocation (ML-PA-LDA). In the current day scenario, a natural source for procuring the training dataset is through mining user-generated content or directly through users in a crowdsourcing platform. In the more practical scenario of crowdsourcing, an additional challenge arises as the labels of the training instances are provided by noisy, heterogeneous crowd-workers with unknown qualities. With this as the motivation, we further adapt our topic model to the scenario where the labels are provided by multiple noisy sources and refer to this model as ML-PA-LDA-MNS (ML-PA-LDA with Multiple Noisy Sources). With experiments on standard datasets, we show that the proposed models achieve superior performance over existing methods. Active Linear Regression with Heterogeneous, Noisy and Strategic Agents In this work, we study the problem of training a linear regression model by procuring labels from multiple noisy agents or crowd annotators, under a budget constraint. We propose a Bayesian model for linear regression from multiple noisy sources and use variational inference for parameter estimation. When labels are sought from agents, it is important to minimize the number of labels procured as every call to an agent incurs a cost. Towards this, we adopt an active learning approach. In this specific context, we prove the equivalence of well-studied criteria of active learning such as entropy minimization and expected error reduction. For the purpose of annotator selection in active learning, we observe a useful connection with the multi-armed bandit framework. Due to the nature of the distribution of the rewards on the arms, we resort to the Robust Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) scheme with truncated empirical mean estimator to solve the annotator selection problem. This yields provable guarantees on the regret. We apply our model to the scenario where annotators are strategic and design suitable incentives to induce them to put in their best efforts. Ranking with Heterogeneous Strategic Agents We look at the problem where a planner must rank multiple strategic agents, a problem that has many applications including sponsored search auctions (SSA). Stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) mechanisms have been used in the literature to solve this problem. Existing stochastic MAB mechanisms with a deterministic payment rule, proposed in the literature, necessarily suffer a regret of (T 2=3), where T is the number of time steps. This happens because these mechanisms address the worst case scenario where the means of the agents’ stochastic rewards are separated by a very small amount that depends on T . We however take a detour and allow the planner to indicate the resolution, , with which the agents must be distinguished. This immediately leads us to introduce the notion of -Regret. We propose a dominant strategy incentive compatible (DSIC) and individually rational (IR), deterministic MAB mechanism, based on ideas from the Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) family of MAB algorithms. The proposed mechanism - UCB achieves a -regret of O(log T ). We first establish the results for single slot SSA and then non-trivially extend the results to the case of multi-slot SSA.