Papers › Active Learning for Convolutional Neural Networks: A Core-Set Approach

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

1 Aug 2017ICLR 2018 1arXiv:1708.00489archive 2025-07-28

Ozan Sener, Silvio Savarese

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.

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blackhc/active-bayesian-coresets mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
dsba-lab/openal mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
hillup/active_learning mentioned on GitHub report
humanlab/rare-class-AL mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
meghshukla/activelearningforhumanpose mentioned on GitHubpytorchAGPL-3.0 report
meghshukla/math-analysis-learningloss mentioned on GitHubpytorchAGPL-3.0 report
rpinsler/active-bayesian-coresets mentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report
svdesai/coreset-al mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Active LearningImage Classificationimage-classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Active Learning CIFAR10 (10,000) Core-set Accuracy 89.92 #5 of 7 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Introduced by this paper: Coresets

Coresets

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