PCoreSet: Effective Active Learning through Knowledge Distillation from Vision-Language Models

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Main Authors: Kang, Seongjae, Lee, Dong Bok, Jang, Hyungjoon, Kim, Dongseop, Hwang, Sung Ju
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Kang, Seongjae
Lee, Dong Bok
Jang, Hyungjoon
Kim, Dongseop
Hwang, Sung Ju
author_facet Kang, Seongjae
Lee, Dong Bok
Jang, Hyungjoon
Kim, Dongseop
Hwang, Sung Ju
contents Knowledge distillation (KD) is a widely used framework for training compact, task-specific models by transferring the knowledge from teacher models. However, its application to active learning (AL), which aims to minimize annotation costs through iterative sample selection, remains underexplored. This gap stems from the fact that KD typically assumes access to sufficient labeled data, whereas AL operates in data-scarce scenarios where task-specific teacher models are often unavailable. In this paper, we first introduce ActiveKD, a framework that integrates AL with KD by leveraging the zero- and few-shot capabilities of large vision-language models (VLMs). A key aspect of ActiveKD is the structured prediction bias of VLMs-i.e., their predictions form clusters in the probability space. We regard this structure as an inductive bias of the teacher model, capturing generalizable output patterns beneficial to student learning. To exploit this bias, we propose Probabilistic CoreSet (PCoreSet), a selection strategy that maximizes coverage in the probability space rather than the feature space. PCoreSet strategically selects probabilistically diverse unlabeled samples, facilitating more efficient transfer of teacher knowledge under limited annotation budgets. Extensive evaluations on 11 datasets show that ActiveKD consistently improves performance across selection methods (e.g., +29.07% on ImageNet, averaged over methods). Under ActiveKD, PCoreSet ranks first in 64/73 settings (approximately 87.7%) across 5 student and 3 teacher networks, always achieving the best performance except for first 2 AL rounds. Our code is available at https://github.com/erjui/PCoreSet.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_00910
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PCoreSet: Effective Active Learning through Knowledge Distillation from Vision-Language Models
Kang, Seongjae
Lee, Dong Bok
Jang, Hyungjoon
Kim, Dongseop
Hwang, Sung Ju
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Knowledge distillation (KD) is a widely used framework for training compact, task-specific models by transferring the knowledge from teacher models. However, its application to active learning (AL), which aims to minimize annotation costs through iterative sample selection, remains underexplored. This gap stems from the fact that KD typically assumes access to sufficient labeled data, whereas AL operates in data-scarce scenarios where task-specific teacher models are often unavailable. In this paper, we first introduce ActiveKD, a framework that integrates AL with KD by leveraging the zero- and few-shot capabilities of large vision-language models (VLMs). A key aspect of ActiveKD is the structured prediction bias of VLMs-i.e., their predictions form clusters in the probability space. We regard this structure as an inductive bias of the teacher model, capturing generalizable output patterns beneficial to student learning. To exploit this bias, we propose Probabilistic CoreSet (PCoreSet), a selection strategy that maximizes coverage in the probability space rather than the feature space. PCoreSet strategically selects probabilistically diverse unlabeled samples, facilitating more efficient transfer of teacher knowledge under limited annotation budgets. Extensive evaluations on 11 datasets show that ActiveKD consistently improves performance across selection methods (e.g., +29.07% on ImageNet, averaged over methods). Under ActiveKD, PCoreSet ranks first in 64/73 settings (approximately 87.7%) across 5 student and 3 teacher networks, always achieving the best performance except for first 2 AL rounds. Our code is available at https://github.com/erjui/PCoreSet.
title PCoreSet: Effective Active Learning through Knowledge Distillation from Vision-Language Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00910