BAT: A Versatile Bipartite Attention-Based Approach for Comprehensive Truth Inference in Mobile Crowdsourcing

The proliferation of smart mobile devices has catalyzed the growth of Mobile CrowdSourcing (MCS) as a distributed problem-solving paradigm. MCS platforms heavily rely on advanced truth inference techniques to extract reliable information from diverse and potentially noisy crowd-contributed data. Existing truth inference models often made simplified assumptions about workers or tasks, employing complex Bayesian models or stringent data aggregation methods. These approaches tend to be task-specific, primarily limited to categorical labeling, making adaptations to other mobile computing scenarios labor-intensive. To address these limitations, we introduce the Bipartite Attention-driven Truth (BAT), a versatile approach tailored for mobile computing environments. BAT utilizes an Attributed Bipartite Graph (ABG) to holistically model the MCS process, with workers and tasks as nodes connected by edges representing answer-specific attributes. The approach employs a bipartite graph neural network with an innovative attention mechanism to assess the importance of different answers. BAT extends beyond categorical tasks to support numerical ones by incorporating novel feature representations and model extensions. Theoretical analyses clarify the link between answer similarity and worker expertise. Extensive experiments using diverse real-world datasets demonstrate BAT's superior performance compared to state-of-the-art categorical and numerical truth inference models, highlighting its effectiveness in mobile computing scenarios.