Wisdom of the crowd (Surowiecki, 2005) revealed a striking fact that the majority answer from a crowd is often more accurate than any individual expert. We observed the same story in machine learning -ensemble methods (Dietterich, 2000) leverage this idea to combine multiple learning algorithms to obtain better classification performance. Among many popular examples is the celebrated Random Forest (Ho, 1995), which applies the majority voting rule in aggregating different decision trees to make the final prediction. Nonetheless, these aggregation rules would fail when the majority is more likely to be wrong. In this paper, we extend the idea proposed in Bayesian Truth Serum (Prelec, 2004) that "a surprisingly more popular answer is more likely the true answer" to classification problems. The challenge for us is to define or detect when an answer should be considered as being "surprising". We present two machine learning aided methods which aim to reveal the truth when it is minority instead of majority who has the true answer. Our experiments over real-world datasets show that better classification performance can be obtained compared to always trusting the majority voting. Our proposed methods also outperform popular ensemble algorithms. Our approach can be generically applied as a subroutine in ensemble methods to replace majority voting rule.
Inspired by work in ensembling human decisions, the authors propose an ensembling technique called "Machine Truth Serum" (based off "Bayesian Truth Serum"). Instead of using majority vote to ensemble the decisions of several classifiers, this paper follows the "surprisingly popular" algorithm; the ensembled decision is the decision whose posterior probability (based on several classifiers) most exceeds a prior probability (given by classifier(s) trained to predict the posterior predictions). It's quite a nice idea to bring this finding from human decision-making to machine learning. If it worked in machine learning, it would be quite surprising, as the surprisingly popular algorithm risks that the ensemble makes a decision against the majority vote, which is usually consider the safe/default option for ensembling.
Overall, I did not find the experiments (in the current state) to provide compelling enough support for the claim that MTS is a useful approach to ensembling in machine learning. 
* Unless I am mistaken, the authors use a more powerful model (an MLP) as the regressor compared to some of the models they ensemble over. In practice, people ensemble the most powerful models they have available, so it's unclear if using a regressor with the same capacity as the ensembled classifiers will provide any additional benefit. On a related note, it would be nice to know what is the classification performance of each individual classifier? As well as how often the regressor correctly choose to go with several weaker models rather than the strongest model. In particular, I am concerned that the performance of the ensemble might be less than or equal to the performance of a single MLP classifier (or whatever other model does best).
* "In this paper, each of the datasets we used has a small size - we chose to focus on the small data regime where the classifiers are likely to make mistakes." Why not try large data tasks that are challenging for state-of-the-art models? The paper makes a general claim that MTS is a good way to aggregate predictions, so only evaluating on small datasets seems to be a limitation
* As I understand (correct me if I am wrong), the reported results are only on examples with "high disagreement" between classifiers. However, for practical use cases, it is useful to know how the overall accuracy compares. One major risk of using the "surprisingly popular" algorithm is that the algorithm may cause the ensemble to make many incorrect predictions when the majority is right (but the minority prediction is selected). If you have those numbers, I would be interested to see them added to the paper.
I am also unsure about if applying the "surprisingly popular" algorithm in machine learning makes sense. The algorithm is motivated by the fact that difference agents have different information. However, in the ML setting, various classifiers usually have the same information. It's possible to restrict the information given to each classifier, but that would limit the performance of each individual classifier (and hurt the ensemble). I would be curious if the authors have any thoughts on this point.
I also have a few questions/concerns about how the approach is implemented:
* Why not train a single model to predict the average prediction of all models and use that model's prediction as the prior? This approach seems simpler but equivalent to the approach currently taken.
* Why not use model distillation (predicting all output logits/probabilities, or an average thereof) rather than just predicting an average of 0/1 predictions?
* For HMTS, why do the regressors for each of L labels need to be separate? It seems more efficient to use a multi-class model (as many model distillation approaches do)
* If DMTS can learn to predict when most classifiers are wrong, why wouldn't the original classifiers themselves learn to predict the answer correctly? It seems to me that the reason the experiments show that DMTS/HMTS work is that some/many of the underlying classifiers are weaker than the model that is used to ensemble the predictions (an assumption that doesn't hold in practice).
Overall, I really like the high-level idea, and a better ensembling approach promises to bring empirical gains across many ML tasks. However, I have several concerns about the experiments, motivation, and algorithmic decisions which make me hesitant to recommend the paper for acceptance.