Classification and comparison via neural networks
We consider learning from comparison labels generated as follows: given two samples in a dataset, a labeler produces a label indicating their relative order. Such comparison labels scale quadratically with the dataset size; most importantly, in practice, they often exhibit lower variance compared to class labels. We propose a new neural network architecture based on siamese networks to incorporate both class and comparison labels in the same training pipeline, using Bradley Terry and Thurstone loss functions. Our architecture leads to a significant improvement in predicting both class and comparison labels, increasing classification AUC by as much as 35% and comparison AUC by as much as 6% on several real life datasets. We further show that, by incorporating comparisons, training from few samples becomes possible: a deep neural network of 5.9 million parameters trained on 80 images attains a 0.92 AUC when incorporating comparisons.
Neural Networks