AI Glossary Term
What does “Weak Supervision” mean?
Definition
Using noisy, heuristic, or partial labels to train models when clean labels are scarce.
How Weak Supervision works
Example
Rather than labeling 100,000 documents by hand, a team writes a few rules, such as 'contains the word invoice'. Each rule is imperfect, but combining them yields approximate labels to train a first model.
Why it matters
It reduces the cost of labeling. The labels contain errors, so the results need checking on a small, carefully labeled set.
Common questions
Is it less accurate than manual labels?
Individual labels are noisier, but at scale the result can be useful, especially with a clean test set.
What are labeling functions?
Small programs or rules that each assign a rough label to some of the data.
Where is it used?
Text classification, information extraction, and other tasks where hand labeling is slow.