about
A Geometric Approach to Active Learning for Convolutional Neural Networks (arxiv.org)
2 points by Katydid on Aug 8, 2017 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Labeling images is costly, so the method picks a small batch that covers the whole collection geometrically, like a representative core, instead of the usual trick of guessing which images the model finds hardest. A model trained on that subset beat other selection strategies by a large margin.

Abstract · Active Learning for Convolutional Neural Networks: A Core-Set Approach

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been successfully applied to many recognition and learning tasks using a universal recipe; training a deep model on a very large dataset of supervised examples. However, this approach is rather restrictive in practice since collecting a large set of labeled images is very expensive. One way to ease this problem is coming up with smart ways for choosing images to be labelled from a very large collection (ie. active learning). Our empirical study suggests that many of the active learning heuristics in the literature are not effective when applied to CNNs in batch setting. Inspired by these limitations, we define the problem of active learning as core-set selection, ie. choosing set of points such that a model learned over the selected subset is competitive for the remaining data points. We further present a theoretical result characterizing the performance of any selected subset using the geometry of the datapoints. As an active learning algorithm, we choose the subset which is expected to yield best result according to our characterization. Our experiments show that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing approaches in image classification experiments by a large margin.

Ozan Sener, Silvio Savarese
arXiv:1708.00489 · stat.ML, cs.CV, cs.LG · submitted Aug 1, 2017 · updated Jun 1, 2018
abstract · pdf · html · ICLR 2018 Paper

add comment on HN