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Hauptverfasser: Werner, Thorben, Schmidt-Thieme, Lars, Yalavarthi, Vijaya Krishna
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00586
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author Werner, Thorben
Schmidt-Thieme, Lars
Yalavarthi, Vijaya Krishna
author_facet Werner, Thorben
Schmidt-Thieme, Lars
Yalavarthi, Vijaya Krishna
contents Even though Active Learning (AL) is widely studied, it is rarely applied in contexts outside its own scientific literature. We posit that the reason for this is AL's high computational cost coupled with the comparatively small lifts it is typically able to generate in scenarios with few labeled points. In this work we study the impact of different methods to combat this low data scenario, namely data augmentation (DA), semi-supervised learning (SSL) and AL. We find that AL is by far the least efficient method of solving the low data problem, generating a lift of only 1-4\% over random sampling, while DA and SSL methods can generate up to 60\% lift in combination with random sampling. However, when AL is combined with strong DA and SSL techniques, it surprisingly is still able to provide improvements. Based on these results, we frame AL not as a method to combat missing labels, but as the final building block to squeeze the last bits of performance out of data after appropriate DA and SSL methods as been applied.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_00586
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Role of Active Learning in Modern Machine Learning
Werner, Thorben
Schmidt-Thieme, Lars
Yalavarthi, Vijaya Krishna
Machine Learning
Even though Active Learning (AL) is widely studied, it is rarely applied in contexts outside its own scientific literature. We posit that the reason for this is AL's high computational cost coupled with the comparatively small lifts it is typically able to generate in scenarios with few labeled points. In this work we study the impact of different methods to combat this low data scenario, namely data augmentation (DA), semi-supervised learning (SSL) and AL. We find that AL is by far the least efficient method of solving the low data problem, generating a lift of only 1-4\% over random sampling, while DA and SSL methods can generate up to 60\% lift in combination with random sampling. However, when AL is combined with strong DA and SSL techniques, it surprisingly is still able to provide improvements. Based on these results, we frame AL not as a method to combat missing labels, but as the final building block to squeeze the last bits of performance out of data after appropriate DA and SSL methods as been applied.
title The Role of Active Learning in Modern Machine Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00586