Bandit-Based Task Assignment for Heterogeneous Crowdsourcing

Neural Comput. 2015 Nov;27(11):2447-75. doi: 10.1162/NECO_a_00782. Epub 2015 Sep 17.

Abstract

We consider a task assignment problem in crowdsourcing, which is aimed at collecting as many reliable labels as possible within a limited budget. A challenge in this scenario is how to cope with the diversity of tasks and the task-dependent reliability of workers; for example, a worker may be good at recognizing the names of sports teams but not be familiar with cosmetics brands. We refer to this practical setting as heterogeneous crowdsourcing. In this letter, we propose a contextual bandit formulation for task assignment in heterogeneous crowdsourcing that is able to deal with the exploration-exploitation trade-off in worker selection. We also theoretically investigate the regret bounds for the proposed method and demonstrate its practical usefulness experimentally.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't