Dual Adversarial Network for Deep Active Learning

Active learning, reducing the cost and workload of annotations, attracts increasing attentions from the community. Current active learning approaches commonly adopted uncertainty-based acquisition functions for the data selection due to their effectiveness. However, data selection based on uncertainty suffers from the overlapping problem, i.e., the top-$K$ samples ranked by the uncertainty are similar. In this paper, we investigate the overlapping problem of recent uncertainty-based approaches and propose to alleviate the issue by taking representativeness into consideration. In particular, we propose a dual adversarial network, namely DAAL, for this purpose. Different from previous hybrid active learning methods requiring multi-stage data selections i.e., step-by-step evaluating the uncertainty and representativeness using different acquisition functions, our DAAL learns to select the most uncertain and representative data points in one-stage. Extensive experiments conducted on three publicly available datasets, i.e., CIFAR10/100 and Cityscapes, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method---a new state-of-the-art accuracy is achieved.