Deep Active Ensemble Sampling For Image Classification

Abstract: Conventional active learning (AL) frameworks aim to reduce the cost of data annotation by actively requesting the labeling for the most informative data points. However, introducing AL to data hungry deep learning algorithms has been a challenge. Some proposed approaches include uncertainty-based techniques, geometric methods, implicit combination of uncertainty-based and geometric approaches, and more recently, frameworks based on semi/self supervised techniques. In this paper, we address two specific problems in this area. The first is the need for efficient exploitation/exploration trade-off in sample selection in AL. For this, we present an innovative integration of recent progress in both uncertainty-based and geometric frameworks to enable an efficient exploration/exploitation trade-off in sample selection strategy. To this end, we build on a computationally efficient approximate of Thompson sampling with key changes as a posterior estimator for uncertainty representation. Our framework provides two advantages: (1) accurate posterior estimation, and (2) tune-able trade-off between computational overhead and higher accuracy. The second problem is the need for improved training protocols in deep AL. For this, we use ideas from semi/self supervised learning to propose a general approach that is independent of the specific AL technique being used. Taken these together, our framework shows a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art, with results that are comparable to the performance of supervised-learning under the same setting. We show empirical results of our framework, and comparative performance with the state-of-the-art on four datasets, namely, MNIST, CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and ImageNet to establish a new baseline in two different settings.