Towards Multimodal Active Learning: Efficient Learning with Limited Paired Data

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Hauptverfasser: Zhang, Jiancheng, Zhu, Yinglun
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Zhang, Jiancheng
Zhu, Yinglun
author_facet Zhang, Jiancheng
Zhu, Yinglun
contents Active learning (AL) is a principled strategy to reduce annotation cost in data-hungry deep learning. However, existing AL algorithms focus almost exclusively on unimodal data, overlooking the substantial annotation burden in multimodal learning. We introduce the first framework for multimodal active learning with unaligned data, where the learner must actively acquire cross-modal alignments rather than labels on pre-aligned pairs. This setting captures the practical bottleneck in modern multimodal pipelines, where unimodal features are easy to obtain but high-quality alignment is costly. We develop a new algorithm that combines uncertainty and diversity principles in a modality-aware design, achieves linear-time acquisition, and applies seamlessly to both pool-based and streaming-based settings. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently reduces multimodal annotation cost while preserving performance; for instance, on the ColorSwap dataset it cuts annotation requirements by up to 40% without loss in accuracy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_03247
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Multimodal Active Learning: Efficient Learning with Limited Paired Data
Zhang, Jiancheng
Zhu, Yinglun
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Active learning (AL) is a principled strategy to reduce annotation cost in data-hungry deep learning. However, existing AL algorithms focus almost exclusively on unimodal data, overlooking the substantial annotation burden in multimodal learning. We introduce the first framework for multimodal active learning with unaligned data, where the learner must actively acquire cross-modal alignments rather than labels on pre-aligned pairs. This setting captures the practical bottleneck in modern multimodal pipelines, where unimodal features are easy to obtain but high-quality alignment is costly. We develop a new algorithm that combines uncertainty and diversity principles in a modality-aware design, achieves linear-time acquisition, and applies seamlessly to both pool-based and streaming-based settings. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently reduces multimodal annotation cost while preserving performance; for instance, on the ColorSwap dataset it cuts annotation requirements by up to 40% without loss in accuracy.
title Towards Multimodal Active Learning: Efficient Learning with Limited Paired Data
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03247