author
Co-Founder
,
Snorkel AI
Professor @ Stanford University
Christopher (Chris) Ré is a professor in the department of computer science at Stanford University. He is in the Stanford AI Lab and is affiliated with the Statistical Machine Learning Group. His recent work is to understand how software and hardware systems will change as a result of machine learning along with a continuing, petulant drive to work on math problems. Research from his group has been incorporated into scientific and humanitarian efforts, such as the fight against human trafficking, along with widely used products from technology and enterprise companies including Google Ads, Gmail, YouTube, and Apple.
He has co-founded four companies based on his research into machine learning systems, SambaNova and Snorkel, along with two companies that are now part of Apple, Lattice (DeepDive) in 2017, and Inductiv (HoloClean) in 2020.
His research contributions have spanned database theory, database systems, and machine learning. His work has won the best paper or test-of-time awards at the premier venues in each area. He still can’t believe he won the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
The latest from Chris
Snorkel: Fast Training Set Generation for Information Extraction
State-of-the art machine learning methods such as deep learning rely on large sets of hand-labeled training data. Collecting training data is prohibitively slow and expensive, especially when technical domain expertise is required; even the largest technology companies struggle with this challenge. We address this critical bottleneck with Snorkel, a new system for quickly creating, managing, and modeling training sets. Snorkel enables users to generate large volumes of training data by writing labeling functions, which are simple functions that express heuristics and other weak supervision strategies. These user-authored labeling functions may have low accuracies and may overlap and conflict, but Snorkel...
Research Paper
Snorkel: Fast Training Set Generation for Information Extraction
State-of-the art machine learning methods such as deep learning rely on large sets of hand-labeled training data. Collecting training data is prohibitively slow and expensive, especially when technical domain expertise is required; even the largest technology companies struggle with this challenge. We address this critical bottleneck with Snorkel, a new system for quickly creating, managing, and modeling training sets. Snorkel…
Learning to Compose Domain-Specific Transformations for Data Augmentation
Data augmentation is a ubiquitous technique for increasing the size of labeled training sets by leveraging task-specific data transformations that preserve class labels. While it is often easy for domain experts to specify individual transformations, constructing and tuning the more sophisticated compositions typically needed to achieve state-of-the-art results is a time-consuming manual task in practice. We propose a method for automating this process by learning a generative sequence model over user-specified transformation functions using a generative adversarial approach. Our method can make use of arbitrary, non-deterministic transformation functions, is robust to misspecified user input, and is trained on unlabeled data....
Research Paper
Learning to Compose Domain-Specific Transformations for Data Augmentation
Data augmentation is a ubiquitous technique for increasing the size of labeled training sets by leveraging task-specific data transformations that preserve class labels. While it is often easy for domain experts to specify individual transformations, constructing and tuning the more sophisticated compositions typically needed to achieve state-of-the-art results is a time-consuming manual task in practice. We propose a method for…
Learning the Structure of Generative Models Without Labeled Data
Curating labeled training data has become the primary bottleneck in machine learning. Recent frameworks address this bottleneck with generative models to synthesize labels at scale from weak supervision sources. The generative model's dependency structure directly affects the quality of the estimated labels, but selecting a structure automatically without any labeled data is a distinct challenge. We propose a structure estimation method that maximizes the $\ell_1$-regularized marginal pseudolikelihood of the observed data. Our analysis shows that the amount of unlabeled data required to identify the true structure scales sublinearly in the number of possible dependencies for a broad class of models....
Research Paper
Learning the Structure of Generative Models Without Labeled Data
Curating labeled training data has become the primary bottleneck in machine learning. Recent frameworks address this bottleneck with generative models to synthesize labels at scale from weak supervision sources. The generative model’s dependency structure directly affects the quality of the estimated labels, but selecting a structure automatically without any labeled data is a distinct challenge. We propose a structure estimation…
Inferring Generative Model Structure With Static Analysis
Obtaining enough labeled data to robustly train complex discriminative models is a major bottleneck in the machine learning pipeline. A popular solution is combining multiple sources of weak supervision using generative models. The structure of these models affects training label quality, but is difficult to learn without any ground truth labels. We instead rely on these weak supervision sources having some structure by virtue of being encoded programmatically. We present Coral, a paradigm that infers generative model structure by statically analyzing the code for these heuristics, thus reducing the data required to learn structure significantly. We prove that Coral's sample...
Research Paper
Inferring Generative Model Structure With Static Analysis
Obtaining enough labeled data to robustly train complex discriminative models is a major bottleneck in the machine learning pipeline. A popular solution is combining multiple sources of weak supervision using generative models. The structure of these models affects training label quality, but is difficult to learn without any ground truth labels. We instead rely on these weak supervision sources having…
Swellshark: A Generative Model for Biomedical Named Entity Recognition Without Labeled Data
We present SwellShark, a framework for building biomedical named entity recognition (NER) systems quickly and without hand-labeled data. Our approach views biomedical resources like lexicons as function primitives for autogenerating weak supervision. We then use a generative model to unify and denoise this supervision and construct large-scale, probabilistically labeled datasets for training high-accuracy NER taggers. In three biomedical NER tasks, SwellShark achieves competitive scores with state-of-the-art supervised benchmarks using no hand-labeled training data. In a drug name extraction task using patient medical records, one domain expert using SwellShark achieved within 5.1% of a crowdsourced annotation approach -- which originally utilized...
Research Paper
Swellshark: A Generative Model for Biomedical Named Entity Recognition Without Labeled Data
We present SwellShark, a framework for building biomedical named entity recognition (NER) systems quickly and without hand-labeled data. Our approach views biomedical resources like lexicons as function primitives for autogenerating weak supervision. We then use a generative model to unify and denoise this supervision and construct large-scale, probabilistically labeled datasets for training high-accuracy NER taggers. In three biomedical NER tasks,…
Socratic Learning: Augmenting Generative Models to Incorporate Latent Subsets in Training Data
A challenge in training discriminative models like neural networks is obtaining enough labeled training data. Recent approaches use generative models to combine weak supervision sources, like user-defined heuristics or knowledge bases, to label training data. Prior work has explored learning accuracies for these sources even without ground truth labels, but they assume that a single accuracy parameter is sufficient to model the behavior of these sources over the entire training set. In particular, they fail to model latent subsets in the training data in which the supervision sources perform differently than on average. We present Socratic learning, a paradigm that...
Research Paper
Socratic Learning: Augmenting Generative Models to Incorporate Latent Subsets in Training Data
A challenge in training discriminative models like neural networks is obtaining enough labeled training data. Recent approaches use generative models to combine weak supervision sources, like user-defined heuristics or knowledge bases, to label training data. Prior work has explored learning accuracies for these sources even without ground truth labels, but they assume that a single accuracy parameter is sufficient to…
Snorkel: Rapid Training Data Creation With Weak Supervision
Labeling training data is increasingly the largest bottleneck in deploying machine learning systems. We present Snorkel, a first-of-its-kind system that enables users to train state-of-the-art models without hand labeling any training data. Instead, users write labeling functions that express arbitrary heuristics, which can have unknown accuracies and correlations. Snorkel denoises their outputs without access to ground truth by incorporating the first end-to-end implementation of our recently proposed machine learning paradigm, data programming. We present a flexible interface layer for writing labeling functions based on our experience over the past year collaborating with companies, agencies, and research labs. In a user...
Research Paper
Snorkel: Rapid Training Data Creation With Weak Supervision
Labeling training data is increasingly the largest bottleneck in deploying machine learning systems. We present Snorkel, a first-of-its-kind system that enables users to train state-of-the-art models without hand labeling any training data. Instead, users write labeling functions that express arbitrary heuristics, which can have unknown accuracies and correlations. Snorkel denoises their outputs without access to ground truth by incorporating the…
Data Programming: Creating Large Training Sets, Quickly
Large labeled training sets are the critical building blocks of supervised learning methods and are key enablers of deep learning techniques. For some applications, creating labeled training sets is the most time-consuming and expensive part of applying machine learning. We therefore propose a paradigm for the programmatic creation of training sets called data programming in which users express weak supervision strategies or domain heuristics as labeling functions, which are programs that label subsets of the data, but that are noisy and may conflict. We show that by explicitly representing this training set labeling process as a generative model, we can...
Research Paper
Data Programming: Creating Large Training Sets, Quickly
Large labeled training sets are the critical building blocks of supervised learning methods and are key enablers of deep learning techniques. For some applications, creating labeled training sets is the most time-consuming and expensive part of applying machine learning. We therefore propose a paradigm for the programmatic creation of training sets called data programming in which users express weak supervision…
Data Programming With DDLite: Putting Humans in a Different Part of the Loop
Populating large-scale structured databases from unstructured sources is a critical and challenging task in data analytics. As automated feature engineering methods grow increasingly prevalent, constructing sufficiently large labeled training sets has become the primary hurdle in building machine learning information extraction systems. In light of this, we have taken a new approach called data programming [7]. Rather than hand-labeling data, in the data programming paradigm, users generate large amounts of noisy training labels by programmatically encoding domain heuristics as simple rules. Using this approach over more traditional distant supervision methods and fully supervised approaches using labeled data, we have been...
Research Paper
Data Programming With DDLite: Putting Humans in a Different Part of the Loop
Populating large-scale structured databases from unstructured sources is a critical and challenging task in data analytics. As automated feature engineering methods grow increasingly prevalent, constructing sufficiently large labeled training sets has become the primary hurdle in building machine learning information extraction systems. In light of this, we have taken a new approach called data programming [7]. Rather than hand-labeling data,…
