Active learning is a paradigm aimed at reducing the annotation effort by training the model on actively selected informative and/or representative samples. Another paradigm to reduce the annotation effort is self-training that learns from a large amount of unlabeled data in an unsupervised way and fine-tunes on few labeled samples. Recent developments in self-training have achieved very impressive results rivaling supervised learning on some datasets. The current work focuses on whether the two paradigms can benefit from each other. We studied object recognition datasets including CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and Tiny ImageNet with several labeling budgets for the evaluations. Our experiments reveal that self-training is remarkably more efficient than active learning at reducing the labeling effort, that for a low labeling budget, active learning offers no benefit to self-training, and finally that the combination of active learning and self-training is fruitful when the labeling budget is high. The performance gap between active learning trained either with self-training or from scratch diminishes as we approach to the point where almost half of the dataset is labeled.

本研究针对减少标注工作的两种范式：主动学习和自学习，研究它们能否相互受益。在对象识别数据集（包括CIFAR10、CIFAR100和Tiny ImageNet）上的实验证明：对于低的标注预算，主动学习对自学习没有帮助。当标注预算很高时，主动学习和自学习的组合是有益的。

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