Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Werner, Thorben, Burchert, Johannes, Stubbemann, Maximilian, Schmidt-Thieme, Lars
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.00426
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913576236613632
author Werner, Thorben
Burchert, Johannes
Stubbemann, Maximilian
Schmidt-Thieme, Lars
author_facet Werner, Thorben
Burchert, Johannes
Stubbemann, Maximilian
Schmidt-Thieme, Lars
contents Active Learning (AL) deals with identifying the most informative samples for labeling to reduce data annotation costs for supervised learning tasks. AL research suffers from the fact that lifts from literature generalize poorly and that only a small number of repetitions of experiments are conducted. To overcome these obstacles, we propose CDALBench, the first active learning benchmark which includes tasks in computer vision, natural language processing and tabular learning. Furthermore, by providing an efficient, greedy oracle, CDALBench can be evaluated with 50 runs for each experiment. We show, that both the cross-domain character and a large amount of repetitions are crucial for sophisticated evaluation of AL research. Concretely, we show that the superiority of specific methods varies over the different domains, making it important to evaluate Active Learning with a cross-domain benchmark. Additionally, we show that having a large amount of runs is crucial. With only conducting three runs as often done in the literature, the superiority of specific methods can strongly vary with the specific runs. This effect is so strong, that, depending on the seed, even a well-established method's performance can be significantly better and significantly worse than random for the same dataset.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_00426
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Cross-Domain Benchmark for Active Learning
Werner, Thorben
Burchert, Johannes
Stubbemann, Maximilian
Schmidt-Thieme, Lars
Machine Learning
Active Learning (AL) deals with identifying the most informative samples for labeling to reduce data annotation costs for supervised learning tasks. AL research suffers from the fact that lifts from literature generalize poorly and that only a small number of repetitions of experiments are conducted. To overcome these obstacles, we propose CDALBench, the first active learning benchmark which includes tasks in computer vision, natural language processing and tabular learning. Furthermore, by providing an efficient, greedy oracle, CDALBench can be evaluated with 50 runs for each experiment. We show, that both the cross-domain character and a large amount of repetitions are crucial for sophisticated evaluation of AL research. Concretely, we show that the superiority of specific methods varies over the different domains, making it important to evaluate Active Learning with a cross-domain benchmark. Additionally, we show that having a large amount of runs is crucial. With only conducting three runs as often done in the literature, the superiority of specific methods can strongly vary with the specific runs. This effect is so strong, that, depending on the seed, even a well-established method's performance can be significantly better and significantly worse than random for the same dataset.
title A Cross-Domain Benchmark for Active Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.00426