Active learning (AL) is a promising ML paradigm that has the potential to parse through large unlabeled data and help reduce annotation cost in domains where labeling entire data can be prohibitive. Recently proposed neural network based AL methods use different heuristics to accomplish this goal. In this study, we show that recent AL methods offer a gain over random baseline under a brittle combination of experimental conditions. We demonstrate that such marginal gains vanish when experimental factors are changed, leading to reproducibility issues and suggesting that AL methods lack robustness. We also observe that with a properly tuned model, which employs recently proposed regularization techniques, the performance significantly improves for all AL methods including the random sampling baseline, and performance differences among the AL methods become negligible. Based on these observations, we suggest a set of experiments that are critical to assess the true effectiveness of an AL method. To facilitate these experiments we also present an open source toolkit. We believe our findings and recommendations will help advance reproducible research in robust AL using neural networks.

本研究旨在证明在相同实验条件下，不同类型的主动学习算法（基于不确定性、多样性和委员会的），与随机采样基准相比，产生的收益不一致，这种性能度量的差异性可能导致结果与以前报告的结果不一致，强正则化下，主动学习方法在各种实验条件下显示出微小或无优势，并提出一套关于如何评估主动学习算法的建议，以确保结果在实验条件变化下具有重复性和稳健性。

使用神经网络实现鲁棒性和可重现的主动学习