Loss-based active learning via double-branch deep network

• Main Authors: Qiang Fang, Xin Xu, Dengqing Tang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publishing 2021-09-01
• Series: International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1177/17298814211044930

Due to the limitation of data annotation and the ability of dealing with label-efficient problems, active learning has received lots of research interest in recent years. Most of the existing approaches focus on designing a different selection strategy to achieve better performance for special tasks; however, the performance of the strategy still needs to be improved. In this work, we focus on improving the performance of active learning and propose a loss-based strategy that learns to predict target losses of unlabeled inputs to select the most uncertain samples, which is designed to learn a better selection strategy based on a double-branch deep network. Experimental results on two visual recognition tasks show that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance compared with previous methods. Moreover, our approach is also robust to different network architectures, biased initial labels, noisy oracles, or sampling budget sizes, and the complexity is also competitive, which demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed approach.