Zero-Round Active Learning

Si Chen, Ruoxi Jia

Abstract

Active learning (AL) aims at reducing labeling effort by identifying the most valuable unlabeled data points from a large pool. Traditional AL frameworks have two limitations: First, they perform data selection in a multi-round manner, which is time-consuming and impractical. Second, they usually assume that there are a small amount of labeled data points available in the same domain as the data in the unlabeled pool. Recent work proposes a solution for one-round active learning based on data utility learning and optimization, which fixes the first issue but still requires the initially labeled data points in the same domain. In this paper, we propose D2ULO as a solution that solves both issues. Specifically, D2ULO leverages the idea of domain adaptation (DA) to train a data utility model which can effectively predict the utility for any given unlabeled data in the target domain once labeled. The trained data utility model can then be used to select high-utility data and at the same time, provide an estimate for the utility of the selected data. Our algorithm does not rely on any feedback from annotators in the target domain and hence, can be used to perform zero-round active learning or warm-start existing multi-round active learning strategies. Our experiments show that D2ULO outperforms the existing state-of-the-art AL strategies equipped with domain adaptation over various domain shift settings (e.g., real-to-real data and synthetic-to-real data). Particularly, D2ULO is applicable to the scenario where source and target labels have mismatches, which is not supported by the existing works.