Noisy Interactive Graph Search

Qianhao Cong, Jing Tang, Kai Han, Yuming Huang, Lei Chen, Yeow Meng Chee

Abstract: The interactive graph search (IGS) problem aims to locate an initially unknown target node leveraging human intelligence. In IGS, we can gradually find the target node by sequentially asking humans some reachability queries like "is the target node reachable from a given node x?". However, human workers may make mistakes when answering these queries. Motivated by this concern, in this paper, we study a noisy version of the IGS problem. Our objective in this problem is to minimize the query complexity while ensuring accuracy. We propose a method to select the query node such that we can push the search process as much as possible and an online method to infer which node is the target after collecting a new answer. By rigorous theoretical analysis, we show that the query complexity of our approach is near-optimal up to a constant factor. The extensive experiments on two real datasets also demonstrate the superiorities of our approach.