{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/reinforced-active-learning-for-image-1","title":"Reinforced active learning for image segmentation","arxiv_id":"2002.06583","date":"2020-02-16","proceeding":"ICLR 2020 1","authors":["Arantxa Casanova","Pedro O. Pinheiro","Negar Rostamzadeh","Christopher J. Pal"],"abstract":"Learning-based approaches for semantic segmentation have two inherent challenges. First, acquiring pixel-wise labels is expensive and time-consuming. Second, realistic segmentation datasets are highly unbalanced: some categories are much more abundant than others, biasing the performance to the most represented ones. In this paper, we are interested in focusing human labelling effort on a small subset of a larger pool of data, minimizing this effort while maximizing performance of a segmentation model on a hold-out set. We present a new active learning strategy for semantic segmentation based on deep reinforcement learning (RL). An agent learns a policy to select a subset of small informative image regions -- opposed to entire images -- to be labeled, from a pool of unlabeled data. The region selection decision is made based on predictions and uncertainties of the segmentation model being trained. Our method proposes a new modification of the deep Q-network (DQN) formulation for active learning, adapting it to the large-scale nature of semantic segmentation problems. We test the proof of concept in CamVid and provide results in the large-scale dataset Cityscapes. On Cityscapes, our deep RL region-based DQN approach requires roughly 30% less additional labeled data than our most competitive baseline to reach the same performance. Moreover, we find that our method asks for more labels of under-represented categories compared to the baselines, improving their performance and helping to mitigate class imbalance.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.06583v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.06583v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"reinforced-active-learning-for-image-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/ArantxaCasanova/ralis","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"active-learning","task_name":"Active Learning"},{"task_slug":"deep-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Deep Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"image-segmentation","task_name":"Image Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"segmentation","task_name":"Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"semantic-segmentation","task_name":"Semantic Segmentation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"convolution","method_name":"Convolution"},{"method_slug":"dqn","method_name":"DQN"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"q-learning","method_name":"Q-Learning"},{"method_slug":"test","method_name":"Test"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2002.06583","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}