Generalized Coverage for More Robust Low-Budget Active Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Bae, Wonho, Noh, Junhyug, Sutherland, Danica J.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Bae, Wonho
Noh, Junhyug
Sutherland, Danica J.
author_facet Bae, Wonho
Noh, Junhyug
Sutherland, Danica J.
contents The ProbCover method of Yehuda et al. is a well-motivated algorithm for active learning in low-budget regimes, which attempts to "cover" the data distribution with balls of a given radius at selected data points. We demonstrate, however, that the performance of this algorithm is extremely sensitive to the choice of this radius hyper-parameter, and that tuning it is quite difficult, with the original heuristic frequently failing. We thus introduce (and theoretically motivate) a generalized notion of "coverage," including ProbCover's objective as a special case, but also allowing smoother notions that are far more robust to hyper-parameter choice. We propose an efficient greedy method to optimize this coverage, generalizing ProbCover's algorithm; due to its close connection to kernel herding, we call it "MaxHerding." The objective can also be optimized non-greedily through a variant of $k$-medoids, clarifying the relationship to other low-budget active learning methods. In comprehensive experiments, MaxHerding surpasses existing active learning methods across multiple low-budget image classification benchmarks, and does so with less computational cost than most competitive methods.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_12212
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Generalized Coverage for More Robust Low-Budget Active Learning
Bae, Wonho
Noh, Junhyug
Sutherland, Danica J.
Machine Learning
The ProbCover method of Yehuda et al. is a well-motivated algorithm for active learning in low-budget regimes, which attempts to "cover" the data distribution with balls of a given radius at selected data points. We demonstrate, however, that the performance of this algorithm is extremely sensitive to the choice of this radius hyper-parameter, and that tuning it is quite difficult, with the original heuristic frequently failing. We thus introduce (and theoretically motivate) a generalized notion of "coverage," including ProbCover's objective as a special case, but also allowing smoother notions that are far more robust to hyper-parameter choice. We propose an efficient greedy method to optimize this coverage, generalizing ProbCover's algorithm; due to its close connection to kernel herding, we call it "MaxHerding." The objective can also be optimized non-greedily through a variant of $k$-medoids, clarifying the relationship to other low-budget active learning methods. In comprehensive experiments, MaxHerding surpasses existing active learning methods across multiple low-budget image classification benchmarks, and does so with less computational cost than most competitive methods.
title Generalized Coverage for More Robust Low-Budget Active Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.12212