Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in various data mining tasks but they heavily rely on a large number of annotated nodes, requiring considerable human efforts. Despite the effectiveness of existing GNN-based Active Learning (AL) methods, they assume that the annotated labels are always correct, which is contradictory to the error-prone labeling process in a practical crowdsourcing environment. Besides, due to this impractical assumption, existing works only focus on optimizing the node selection in AL but neglect optimizing the labeling process. Therefore, we present NC-ALG, the first GNN-based AL framework that optimizes both the node selection and node labeling process under a noisy crowd. For node selection, NC-ALG introduces a new measurement to model influence reliability and an effective influence maximization objective to select nodes. For node labeling, NC-ALG significantly reduces the labeling cost by considering the model-predicted labels and the labels of mirror nodes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to consider GNN-based AL under the practical noisy crowd. Empirical studies on public datasets demonstrate that NC-ALG significantly outperforms existing methods in terms labeling efficiency. Notably, it only takes NC-ALG one-third of the labeling budget that the competitive baseline GRAIN needs to achieve an accuracy of 70.7 % on PubMed.

Message passing is the core of most graph models such as Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and Label Propagation (LP), which usually require a large number of clean labeled data to smooth out the neighborhood over the graph. However, the labeling process can be tedious, costly, and error-prone in practice. In this paper, we propose to unify active learning (AL) and message passing towards minimizing labeling costs, e.g., making use of few and unreliable labels that can be obtained cheaply. We make two contributions towards that end. First, we open up a perspective by drawing a connection between AL enforcing message passing and social influence maximization, ensuring that the selected samples effectively improve the model performance. Second, we propose an extension to the influence model that incorporates an explicit quality factor to model label noise. In this way, we derive a fundamentally new AL selection criterion for GCN and LP--reliable influence maximization (RIM)--by considering quantity and quality of influence simultaneously. Empirical studies on public datasets show that RIM significantly outperforms current AL methods in terms of accuracy and efficiency.