This paper introduces a novel framework named the Ranking Auxiliary Classifier Generative Adversarial Network (RAC-GAN), which leverages a dual strategy involving a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based data generator for oversampling and a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based ranker for undersampling. The RAC-GAN is designed to concurrently oversample and undersample both majority and minority classes during each training epoch, aiming to enhance model performance on imbalanced datasets. The proposed framework is fully end-to-end trainable. At each training iteration, it learns: (i) when to perform oversampling, undersampling, or both operations; (ii) how to identify relevant regions in the data for these operations; and (iii) the extent to which these operations should be carried out. We present experimental results on 11 real-world imbalanced datasets, varying in size and complexity, and evaluated against a range of heuristic and state-of-the-art baselines. The outcomes demonstrate the efficacy of the RAC-GAN framework in improving model performance across different classifiers.

Federated Learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm in which multiple clients participate to collectively learn a global machine learning model at the central server. It is plausible that not all the data owned by each client is relevant to the server's learning objective. The updates incorporated from irrelevant data could be detrimental to the global model. The task of selecting relevant data is explored in traditional machine learning settings where the assumption is that all the data is available in one place. In FL settings, the data is distributed across multiple clients and the server can't introspect it. This precludes the application of traditional solutions to selecting relevant data here. In this paper, we propose an approach called Federated Learning with Relevant Data (FLRD), that facilitates clients to derive updates using relevant data. Each client learns a model called Relevant Data Selector (RDS) that is private to itself to do the selection. This in turn helps in building an effective global model. We perform experiments with multiple real-world datasets to demonstrate the efficacy of our solution. The results show (a) the capability of FLRD to identify relevant data samples at each client locally and (b) the superiority of the global model learned by FLRD over other baseline algorithms.

It is widely accepted that data preparation is one of the most time-consuming steps of the machine learning (ML) lifecycle. It is also one of the most important steps, as the quality of data directly influences the quality of a model. In this tutorial, we will discuss the importance and the role of exploratory data analysis (EDA) and data visualisation techniques to find data quality issues and for data preparation, relevant to building ML pipelines. We will also discuss the latest advances in these fields and bring out areas that need innovation. To make the tutorial actionable for practitioners, we will also discuss the most popular open-source packages that one can get started with along with their strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we will discuss on the challenges posed by industry workloads and the gaps to be addressed to make data-centric AI real in industry settings.

The quality of training data has a huge impact on the efficiency, accuracy and complexity of machine learning tasks. Data remains susceptible to errors or irregularities that may be introduced during collection, aggregation or annotation stage. This necessitates profiling and assessment of data to understand its suitability for machine learning tasks and failure to do so can result in inaccurate analytics and unreliable decisions. While researchers and practitioners have focused on improving the quality of models, there are limited efforts towards improving the data quality.

It is well understood from literature that the performance of a machine learning (ML) model is upper bounded by the quality of the data. While researchers and practitioners have focused on improving the quality of models (such as neural architecture search and automated feature selection), there are limited efforts towards improving the data quality. One of the crucial requirements before consuming datasets for any application is to understand the dataset at hand and failure to do so can result in inaccurate analytics and unreliable decisions. Assessing the quality of the data across intelligently designed metrics and developing corresponding transformation operations to address the quality gaps helps to reduce the effort of a data scientist for iterative debugging of the ML pipeline to improve model performance. This tutorial highlights the importance of analysing data quality in terms of its value for machine learning applications. This tutorial surveys all the important data quality related approaches discussed in literature, focusing on the intuition behind them, highlighting their strengths and similarities, and illustrates their applicability to real-world problems. Finally we will discuss the interesting work IBM Research is doing in this space.

Images are an essential tool for communicating with children, particularly at younger ages when they are still developing their emergent literacy skills. Hence, assessments that use images to assess their conceptual knowledge and visual literacy, are an important component of their learning process. Creating assessments at scale is a challenging task, which has led to several techniques being proposed for automatic generation of textual assessments. However, none of them focuses on generating image-based assessments. To understand the manual process of creating visual assessments, we interviewed primary school teachers. Based on the findings from the preliminary study, we present a novel approach which uses image semantics to generate visual multiple choice questions (VMCQs) for young learners, wherein options are presented in the form of images. We propose a metric to measure the semantic similarity between two images, which we use to identify the four options – one answer and three distractor images – for a given question. We also use this metric for generating VMCQs at two difficulty levels – easy and hard. Through a quantitative evaluation, we show that the system-generated VMCQs are comparable to VMCQs created by experts, hence establishing the effectiveness of our approach.