Paper ID: 2210.17467

Iterative Teaching by Data Hallucination

Zeju Qiu, Weiyang Liu, Tim Z. Xiao, Zhen Liu, Umang Bhatt, Yucen Luo, Adrian Weller, Bernhard Schölkopf

We consider the problem of iterative machine teaching, where a teacher sequentially provides examples based on the status of a learner under a discrete input space (i.e., a pool of finite samples), which greatly limits the teacher's capability. To address this issue, we study iterative teaching under a continuous input space where the input example (i.e., image) can be either generated by solving an optimization problem or drawn directly from a continuous distribution. Specifically, we propose data hallucination teaching (DHT) where the teacher can generate input data intelligently based on labels, the learner's status and the target concept. We study a number of challenging teaching setups (e.g., linear/neural learners in omniscient and black-box settings). Extensive empirical results verify the effectiveness of DHT.

Submitted: Oct 31, 2022