Foreshadowing the Benefits of Incidental Supervision
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Learning theory mostly addresses the standard learning paradigm, assuming the availability of complete and correct supervision signals for large amounts of data. However, in practice, machine learning researchers and practitioners acquire and make use of a range of incidental supervision signals that only have statistical associations with the gold supervision. This paper addresses the question: Can one quantify models' performance when learning with such supervision signals, without going through an exhaustive experimentation process with various supervision signals and learning protocols? To quantify the benefits of various incidental supervision signals, we propose a unified PAC-Bayesian Informativeness measure (PABI), characterizing the reduction in uncertainty that incidental supervision signals provide. We then demonstrate PABI's use in quantifying various types of incidental signals such as partial labels, noisy labels, constraints, cross-domain signals, and some combinations of these. Experiments on named entity recognition and question answering show that PABI correlates well with learning performance, providing a promising way to determine, ahead of learning, which supervision signals would be beneficial.
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