Towards General and Efficient Active Learning

Active learning aims to select the most informative samples to exploit limited annotation budgets. Most existing work follows a cumbersome pipeline by repeating the time-consuming model training and batch data selection multiple times on each dataset separately. We challenge this status quo by proposing a novel general and efficient active learning (GEAL) method in this paper. Utilizing a publicly available model pre-trained on a large dataset, our method can conduct data selection processes on different datasets with a single-pass inference of the same model. To capture the subtle local information inside images, we propose knowledge clusters that are easily extracted from the intermediate features of the pre-trained network. Instead of the troublesome batch selection strategy, all data samples are selected in one go by performing K-Center-Greedy in the fine-grained knowledge cluster level. The entire procedure only requires single-pass model inference without training or supervision, making our method notably superior to prior arts in terms of time complexity by up to hundreds of times. Extensive experiments widely demonstrate the promising performance of our method on object detection, semantic segmentation, depth estimation, and image classification.