Noisy Multi-Label Aggregation with Self-Supervised Graph Transformer in Mobile Crowdsourcing

Aggregating noisy labels from mobile crowdsourcing (MCS) to recover true labels is a fundamental yet challenging problem, especially due to the sparsity and unreliability of crowd-contributed data. While most prior work addresses only single-label scenarios, real-world MCS applications often require robust solutions for both single-label and multi-label tasks, where each instance may be associated with multiple categories. In this paper, we propose ATHENA, a novel approach that leverages self-supervision signals inherent in MCS data for effective label aggregation. Firstly, we propose a graph transformer model that can learn from the MCS topology and features. Then, we propose self-supervision signals inherently included in the dataset to help aggregate the labels. To address the unique challenges of multi-label aggregation, we further extend our approach to ATHENA+, introducing a label message passing (LMP) module that explicitly models correlations and dependencies among labels. We conducted extensive experiments on multiple single-label and multi-label classification datasets, comparing the proposed models with state-of-the-art methods. Our results demonstrate that ATHENA and ATHENA+ are highly effective in aggregating labels and obtain much better performance than existing methods.