In this paper, we argue that the way we have been training and evaluating ML models has largely forgotten the fact that they are applied in an organization or societal context as they provide value to people. We show that with this perspective we fundamentally change how we evaluate and select machine learning models.

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In many practical applications, machine learning models are embedded into a pipeline involving a human actor that decides whether to trust the machine prediction or take a default route (e.g., classify the example herself). Selective classifiers have the option to abstain from making a prediction on an example they do not feel confident about. Recently, the notion of the value of a machine learning model has been introduced as a way to jointly consider the benefit of a correct prediction, the cost of an error, and that of abstaining. In this paper, we study how active learning of selective classifiers is affected by the focus on value. We show that the performance of the state-of-the-art active learning strategies drops significantly when we evaluate them based on value rather than accuracy. Finally, we propose a novel value-aware active learning strategy that outperforms the state-of-the-art ones when the cost of incorrect predictions substantially outweighs that of abstaining.

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Hate speech moderation remains a challenging task for social media platforms. Human-AI collaborative systems offer the potential to combine the strengths of humans' reliability and the scalability of machine learning to tackle this issue effectively. While methods for task handover in human-AI collaboration exist that consider the costs of incorrect predictions, insufficient attention has been paid to accurately estimating these costs. In this work, we propose a value-sensitive rejection mechanism that automatically rejects machine decisions for human moderation based on users' value perceptions regarding machine decisions. We conduct a crowdsourced survey study with 160 participants to evaluate their perception of correct and incorrect machine decisions in the domain of hate speech detection, as well as occurrences where the system rejects making a prediction. Here, we introduce Magnitude Estimation, an unbounded scale, as the preferred method for measuring user (dis)agreement with machine decisions. Our results show that Magnitude Estimation can provide a reliable measurement of participants' perception of machine decisions. By integrating user-perceived value into human-AI collaboration, we further show that it can guide us in 1) determining when to accept or reject machine decisions to obtain the optimal total value a model can deliver and 2) selecting better classification models as compared to the more widely used target of model accuracy.

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Training data creation is increasingly a key bottleneck for developing machine learning, especially for deep learning systems. Active learning provides a cost-effective means for creating training data by selecting the most informative instances for labeling. Labels in real applications are often collected from crowdsourcing, which engages online crowds for data labeling at scale. Despite the importance of using crowdsourced data in the active learning process, an analysis of how the existing active learning approaches behave over crowdsourced data is currently missing. This paper aims to fill this gap by reviewing the existing active learning approaches and then testing a set of benchmarking ones on crowdsourced datasets. We provide a comprehensive and systematic survey of the recent research on active learning in the hybrid human–machine classification setting, where crowd workers contribute labels (often noisy) to either directly classify data instances or to train machine learning models. We identify three categories of state of the art active learning methods according to whether and how predefined queries employed for data sampling, namely fixed-strategy approaches, dynamic-strategy approaches, and strategy-free approaches. We then conduct an empirical study on their cost-effectiveness, showing that the performance of the existing active learning approaches is affected by many factors in hybrid classification contexts, such as the noise level of data, label fusion technique used, and the specific characteristics of the task. Finally, we discuss challenges and identify potential directions to design active learning strategies for hybrid classification problems.

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We motivate why the science of learning to reject model predictions is central to ML, and why human computation has a lead role in this effort.@en

Hybrid classification services are online services that combine machine learning (ML) and humans - either crowd workers or experts - to achieve a classification objective, from relatively simple ones such as deriving the sentiment of a text to more complex ones such as medical diagnoses. This paper takes the first steps toward a science for hybrid classification services, discussing key concepts, challenges, and architectures, and then focusing on a central aspect, that of ML calibration and how it can be achieved with crowdsourced labels.@en