Chris Ré

Biomedical repositories such as the UK Biobank provide increasing access to prospectively collected cardiac imaging, however these data are unlabeled, which creates barriers to their use in supervised machine learning. We develop a weakly supervised deep learning model for classification of aortic valve malformations using up to 4,000 unlabeled cardiac MRI sequences. Instead of requiring highly curated training data, weak…

While the detection and classification of simple objects encountered during autonomous driving sessions has been widely researched, the detection of complex objects and situations based on the combinations of objects in a scene remains relatively overlooked. This is especially difficult due to the cost of gathering labels for each complex scenario of interest before training a specialized model. To address…

As machine learning models continue to increase in complexity, collecting large hand-labeled training sets has become one of the biggest roadblocks in practice. Instead, weaker forms of supervision that provide noisier but cheaper labels are often used. However, these weak supervision sources have diverse and unknown accuracies, may output correlated labels, and may label different tasks or apply at different…

Over the last several years, machine learning models have reached new levels of empirical performance across a broad range of domains. Driven both by accuracy improvements and deployment advantages, many organizations have begun to shift to learning-centered software stacks—a new mode that has been called Software 2.0. This approach holds the promise of radically accelerating the construction, maintenance, and deployment…

As deep learning models are applied to increasingly diverse problems, a key bottleneck is gathering enough high-quality training labels tailored to each task. Users therefore turn to weak supervision, relying on imperfect sources of labels like pattern matching and user-defined heuristics. Unfortunately, users have to design these sources for each task. This process can be time consuming and expensive: domain…

Labeling training data is one of the most costly bottlenecks in developing machine learning-based applications. We present a first-of-its-kind study showing how existing knowledge resources from across an organization can be used as weak supervision in order to bring development time and cost down by an order of magnitude, and introduce Snorkel DryBell, a new weak supervision management system for…

In real-world machine learning applications, data subsets correspond to especially critical outcomes: vulnerable cyclist detections are safety-critical in an autonomous driving task, and “question” sentences might be important to a dialogue agent’s language understanding for product purposes. While machine learning models can achieve quality performance on coarse-grained metrics like F1-score and overall accuracy, they may underperform on these critical subsets—we…

Visual knowledge bases such as Visual Genome power numerous applications in computer vision, including visual question answering and captioning, but suffer from sparse, incomplete relationships. All scene graph models to date are limited to training on a small set of visual relationships that have thousands of training labels each. Hiring human annotators is expensive, and using textual knowledge base completion…

Supervised methods are commonly used for machine-learning based applications but require expensive labeled dataset creation and maintenance. Increasingly, practitioners employ weak supervision approaches, where training labels are programmatically generated in higher-level but noisier ways. However, these approaches require domain experts with programming skills. Additionally, highly imbalanced data is often a significant practical challenge for these approaches. In this work, we…