Max-Margin Majority Voting for Learning from Crowds

Learning-from-crowds aims to design proper aggregation strategies to infer the unknown true labels from the noisy labels provided by ordinary web workers. This paper presents max-margin majority voting (MV) to improve the discriminative ability of majority voting and further presents a Bayesian generalization to incorporate the flexibility of generative methods on modeling noisy observations with worker confusion matrices. We formulate the joint learning as a regularized Bayesian inference problem, where the posterior regularization is derived by maximizing the margin between the aggregated score of a potential true label and that of any alternative label. Our Bayesian model naturally covers the Dawid-Skene estimator and MV. Empirical results demonstrate that our methods are competitive, often achieving better results than state-of-the-art estimators.