Abstract:Traditional supervised learning requires the groundtruth labels for the training data, which can be difficult to collect in many cases. In contrast, crowdsourcing learning collects noisy annotations from multiple non-expert workers and infers the latent true labels through some aggregation approach. In this paper, we notice that existing deep crowdsourcing work does not sufficiently model worker correlations, which is, however, shown to be helpful for learning by previous non-deep learning approaches. We propose a deep generative crowdsourcing learning approach to incorporate the strengths of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and exploit worker correlations. The model comprises a DNN classifier as a prior and an annotation generation process. A mixture model of workers' capabilities within each class is introduced into the annotation generation process for worker correlation modeling. For adaptive trade-off between model complexity and data fitting, we implement fully Bayesian inference. Based on the natural-gradient stochastic variational inference techniques developed for the Structured Variational AutoEncoder (SVAE), we combine variational message passing for conjugate parameters and stochastic gradient descent for DNN parameters into a unified framework for efficient end-to-end optimization. Experimental results on 22 real crowdsourcing datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.