Machine Learning from Explanations

Acquiring and training on large-scale labeled data can be impractical due to cost constraints. Additionally, the use of small training datasets can result in considerable variability in model outcomes, overfitting, and learning of spurious correlations. A crucial shortcoming of data labels is their lack of any reasoning behind a specific label assignment, causing models to learn any arbitrary classification rule as long as it aligns data with labels. To overcome these issues, we introduce an innovative approach for training reliable classification models on smaller datasets, by using simple explanation signals such as important input features from labeled data. Our method centers around a two-stage training cycle that alternates between enhancing model prediction accuracy and refining its attention to match the explanations. This instructs models to grasp the rationale behind label assignments during their learning phase. We demonstrate that our training cycle expedites the convergence towards more accurate and reliable models, particularly for small, class-imbalanced training data, or data with spurious features.