Zero-Round Active Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces D2ULO, a zero-round active learning method that leverages domain adaptation to select valuable data in the target domain without initial labeled data, outperforming existing strategies.

Contribution

D2ULO is the first approach enabling zero-round active learning with domain adaptation, eliminating the need for initial labeled data in the target domain.

Findings

D2ULO outperforms state-of-the-art AL strategies across various domain shifts.

It effectively handles source-target label mismatches.

The method enables warm-starting existing multi-round AL strategies.

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 $\mathrm{D^2ULO}$ as a solution that solves both issues. Specifically, $\mathrm{D^2ULO}$ 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 $\mathrm{D^2ULO}$ 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, $\mathrm{D^2ULO}$ is applicable to the scenario where source and target labels have mismatches, which is not supported by the existing works.