Learning with Feature Feedback: from Theory to Practice

In supervised learning, a human annotator only needs to assign each data point (document, image, etc.) its correct label. But in many situations, the human can also provide richer feedback at essentially no extra cost. In this paper, we examine a particular type of feature feedback that has been used, with some success, in information retrieval and in computer vision. We formalize two models of feature feedback, give learning algorithms for them, and quantify their usefulness in the learning process. Our experiments also show the efficacy of these methods.