Balancing Accuracy, Calibration, and Efficiency in Active Learning with Vision Transformers Under Label Noise

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Mots'oehli, Moseli, Mogale, Hope, Baek, Kyungim
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Mots'oehli, Moseli
Mogale, Hope
Baek, Kyungim
author_facet Mots'oehli, Moseli
Mogale, Hope
Baek, Kyungim
contents Fine-tuning pre-trained convolutional neural networks on ImageNet for downstream tasks is well-established. Still, the impact of model size on the performance of vision transformers in similar scenarios, particularly under label noise, remains largely unexplored. Given the utility and versatility of transformer architectures, this study investigates their practicality under low-budget constraints and noisy labels. We explore how classification accuracy and calibration are affected by symmetric label noise in active learning settings, evaluating four vision transformer configurations (Base and Large with 16x16 and 32x32 patch sizes) and three Swin Transformer configurations (Tiny, Small, and Base) on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 datasets, under varying label noise rates. Our findings show that larger ViT models (ViTl32 in particular) consistently outperform their smaller counterparts in both accuracy and calibration, even under moderate to high label noise, while Swin Transformers exhibit weaker robustness across all noise levels. We find that smaller patch sizes do not always lead to better performance, as ViTl16 performs consistently worse than ViTl32 while incurring a higher computational cost. We also find that information-based Active Learning strategies only provide meaningful accuracy improvements at moderate label noise rates, but they result in poorer calibration compared to models trained on randomly acquired labels, especially at high label noise rates. We hope these insights provide actionable guidance for practitioners looking to deploy vision transformers in resource-constrained environments, where balancing model complexity, label noise, and compute efficiency is critical in model fine-tuning or distillation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_04375
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Balancing Accuracy, Calibration, and Efficiency in Active Learning with Vision Transformers Under Label Noise
Mots'oehli, Moseli
Mogale, Hope
Baek, Kyungim
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Fine-tuning pre-trained convolutional neural networks on ImageNet for downstream tasks is well-established. Still, the impact of model size on the performance of vision transformers in similar scenarios, particularly under label noise, remains largely unexplored. Given the utility and versatility of transformer architectures, this study investigates their practicality under low-budget constraints and noisy labels. We explore how classification accuracy and calibration are affected by symmetric label noise in active learning settings, evaluating four vision transformer configurations (Base and Large with 16x16 and 32x32 patch sizes) and three Swin Transformer configurations (Tiny, Small, and Base) on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 datasets, under varying label noise rates. Our findings show that larger ViT models (ViTl32 in particular) consistently outperform their smaller counterparts in both accuracy and calibration, even under moderate to high label noise, while Swin Transformers exhibit weaker robustness across all noise levels. We find that smaller patch sizes do not always lead to better performance, as ViTl16 performs consistently worse than ViTl32 while incurring a higher computational cost. We also find that information-based Active Learning strategies only provide meaningful accuracy improvements at moderate label noise rates, but they result in poorer calibration compared to models trained on randomly acquired labels, especially at high label noise rates. We hope these insights provide actionable guidance for practitioners looking to deploy vision transformers in resource-constrained environments, where balancing model complexity, label noise, and compute efficiency is critical in model fine-tuning or distillation.
title Balancing Accuracy, Calibration, and Efficiency in Active Learning with Vision Transformers Under Label Noise
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.04375