Cartography Active Learning

TL;DR

Cartography Active Learning (CAL) is a new AL method that uses model behavior during training to select informative instances, leading to more data-efficient learning in text classification.

Contribution

CAL introduces a novel approach to active learning by leveraging training dynamics and data maps, improving data efficiency over traditional post-training strategies.

Findings

CAL is competitive with existing AL methods.

CAL achieves similar or better results with less data.

Training dynamics can effectively guide data selection.

Abstract

We propose Cartography Active Learning (CAL), a novel Active Learning (AL) algorithm that exploits the behavior of the model on individual instances during training as a proxy to find the most informative instances for labeling. CAL is inspired by data maps, which were recently proposed to derive insights into dataset quality (Swayamdipta et al., 2020). We compare our method on popular text classification tasks to commonly used AL strategies, which instead rely on post-training behavior. We demonstrate that CAL is competitive to other common AL methods, showing that training dynamics derived from small seed data can be successfully used for AL. We provide insights into our new AL method by analyzing batch-level statistics utilizing the data maps. Our results further show that CAL results in a more data-efficient learning strategy, achieving comparable or better results with considerably less training data.