Over the last couple of years, deep learning and especially convolutional neural networks have become one of the work horses of computer vision. One limiting factor for the applicability of supervised deep learning to more areas is the need for large, manually labeled datasets. In this paper we propose an easy to implement method we call guided labeling, which automatically determines which samples from an unlabeled dataset should be labeled. We show that using this procedure, the amount of samples that need to be labeled is reduced considerably in comparison to labeling images arbitrarily.
The idea of using the uncertainty of a system to guide the labeling is called in the field of active learning and was also already introduced in 1994 by Lewis al @cite_7 although they did not use the entropy of a resulting probability distribution as we propose for our method. Entropy as a confusion measure has been used in 2004 by Rebecca Hwa @cite_0 for statistical parsing.
@cite_0 @cite_7
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To solve the knowledge bottleneck problem, active learning has been widely used for its ability to automatically select the most informative unlabeled examples for human annotation. One of the key enabling techniques of active learning is uncertainty sampling, which uses one classifier to identify unlabeled examples with the least confidence. Uncertainty sampling often presents problems when outliers are selected. To solve the outlier problem, this paper presents two techniques, sampling by uncertainty and density (SUD) and density-based re-ranking. Both techniques prefer not only the most informative example in terms of uncertainty criterion, but also the most representative example in terms of density criterion. Experimental results of active learning for word sense disambiguation and text classification tasks using six real-world evaluation data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. This paper presents a novel multi-label active learning (MLAL) technique in the framework of multi-label remote sensing (RS) image scene classification problems. The proposed MLAL technique is developed in the framework of the multi-label SVM classifier (ML-SVM). Unlike the standard AL methods, the proposed MLAL technique redefines active learning by evaluating the informativeness of each image based on its multiple land-cover classes. Accordingly, the proposed MLAL technique is based on the joint evaluation of two criteria for the selection of the most informative images: i) multi-label uncertainty and ii) multi-label diversity. The multi-label uncertainty criterion is associated to the confidence of the multi-label classification algorithm in correctly assigning multi-labels to each image, whereas multi-label diversity criterion aims at selecting a set of un-annotated images that are as more diverse as possible to reduce the redundancy among them. In order to evaluate the multi-label uncertainty of each image, we propose a novel multi-label margin sampling strategy that: 1) considers the functional distances of each image to all ML-SVM hyperplanes; and then 2) estimates the occurrence on how many times each image falls inside the margins of ML-SVMs. If the occurrence is small, the classifiers are confident to correctly classify the considered image, and vice versa. In order to evaluate the multi-label diversity of each image, we propose a novel clustering-based strategy that clusters all the images inside the margins of the ML-SVMs and avoids selecting the uncertain images from the same clusters. The joint use of the two criteria allows one to enrich the training set of images with multi-labels. Experimental results obtained on a benchmark archive with 2100 images with their multi-labels show the effectiveness of the proposed MLAL method compared to the standard AL methods that neglect the evaluation of the uncertainty and diversity on multi-labels. Mining data with minimal annotation costs requires efficient active approaches, that ideally select the optimal candidate for labelling under a user-specified classification performance measure. Common generic approaches, that are usable with any classifier and any performance measure, are either slow like error reduction, or heuristics like uncertainty sampling. In contrast, our Probabilistic Active Learning (PAL) approach offers versatility, direct optimisation of a performance measure and computational efficiency. Given a labelling candidate from a pool, PAL models both the candidate’s label and the true posterior in its neighbourhood as random variables. By computing the expectation of the gain in classification performance over both random variables, PAL then selects the candidate that in expectation will improve the classification performance the most. Extending our recent poster, we discuss the properties of PAL and perform a thorough experimental evaluation on several synthetic and real-world data sets of different sizes. Results show comparable or better classification performance than error reduction and uncertainty sampling, yet PAL has the same asymptotic time complexity as uncertainty sampling and is faster than error reduction. The abundance of real-world data and limited labeling budget calls for active learning, an important learning paradigm for reducing human labeling efforts. Many recently developed active learning algorithms consider both uncertainty and representativeness when making querying decisions. However, exploiting representativeness with uncertainty concurrently usually requires tackling sophisticated and challenging learning tasks, such as clustering. In this letter, we propose a new active learning framework, called hinted sampling, which takes both uncertainty and representativeness into account in a simpler way. We design a novel active learning algorithm within the hinted sampling framework with an extended support vector machine. Experimental results validate that the novel active learning algorithm can result in a better and more stable performance than that achieved by state-of-the-art algorithms. We also show that the hinted sampling framework allows improving another active learning algorithm designed from the transductive support vector machine.