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Stochastic Batch Acquisition for Deep Active Learning

We provide a stochastic strategy for adapting well-known acquisition functions to allow batch active learning. In deep active learning, labels are often acquired in batches for efficiency. However, many acquisition functions are designed for single-sample acquisition and fail when naively used to construct batches. In contrast, state-of-the-art batch acquisition functions are costly to compute. We show how to extend single-sample acquisition functions to the batch setting. Instead of acquiring the top-K points from the pool set, we account for the fact that acquisition scores are expected to change as new points are acquired. This motivates simple stochastic acquisition strategies using score-based or rank-based distributions. Our strategies outperform the standard top-K acquisition with virtually no computational overhead and can be used as a drop-in replacement. In fact, they are even competitive with much more expensive methods despite their linear computational complexity. We conclude that there is no reason to use top-K batch acquisition in practice.
Andreas Kirsch, Sebastian Farquhar, Parmida Atighehchian, Andrew Jesson, Frederic Branchaud-Charron, Yarin Gal
ArXiv
[paper]

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