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Making Your First Choice: To Address Cold Start Problem in Vision Active Learning
Liangyu Chen · Yutong Bai · Siyu Huang · Yongyi Lu · Bihan Wen · Alan Yuille · Zongwei Zhou

@
in Human in the Loop Learning (HiLL) Workshop at NeurIPS 2022 »

Active learning promises to improve annotation efficiency by iteratively selecting the most important data to be annotated first. However, we uncover a striking contradiction to this promise: active learning fails to select data as efficiently as random selection at the first few choices. We identify this as the cold start problem in vision active learning, caused by a biased and outlier initial query. This paper seeks to address the cold start problem by exploiting the three advantages of contrastive learning: (1) no annotation is required; (2) label diversity is ensured by pseudo-labels to mitigate bias; (3) typical data is determined by contrastive features to reduce outliers. Experiments are conducted on CIFAR-10-LT and three medical imaging datasets (i.e. Colon Pathology, Abdominal CT, and Blood Cell Microscope). Our initial query not only significantly outperforms existing active querying strategies but also surpasses random selection by a large margin. We foresee our solution to the cold start problem as a simple yet strong baseline to choose the initial query for vision active learning. Code is available: https://github.com/c-liangyu/CSVAL

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Author Information

Liangyu Chen (Nanyang Technological University)
Yutong Bai (Johns Hopkins University)
Siyu Huang (Harvard University)
Yongyi Lu (SYSU)
Bihan Wen (Nanyang Technological University)
Alan Yuille (JHU)
Zongwei Zhou (Johns Hopkins University)

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