Corruption Robust Active Learning
This work addresses the challenge of robust active learning in adversarial environments, which is incremental by building on existing frameworks to handle more general corruption scenarios.
The paper tackles the problem of active learning for binary classification under unknown adversarial label corruptions, showing that a modified classical framework achieves nearly the same label complexity in benign settings, and proposing a new algorithm that is provably correct in general corruption settings with only a logarithmic increase in label complexity.
We conduct theoretical studies on streaming-based active learning for binary classification under unknown adversarial label corruptions. In this setting, every time before the learner observes a sample, the adversary decides whether to corrupt the label or not. First, we show that, in a benign corruption setting (which includes the misspecification setting as a special case), with a slight enlargement on the hypothesis elimination threshold, the classical RobustCAL framework can (surprisingly) achieve nearly the same label complexity guarantee as in the non-corrupted setting. However, this algorithm can fail in the general corruption setting. To resolve this drawback, we propose a new algorithm which is provably correct without any assumptions on the presence of corruptions. Furthermore, this algorithm enjoys the minimax label complexity in the non-corrupted setting (which is achieved by RobustCAL) and only requires $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(C_{\mathrm{total}})$ additional labels in the corrupted setting to achieve $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon + \frac{C_{\mathrm{total}}}{n})$, where $\varepsilon$ is the target accuracy, $C_{\mathrm{total}}$ is the total number of corruptions and $n$ is the total number of unlabeled samples.