Active Learning With Optimal Instance Subset Selection

Active learning (AL) traditionally relies on some instance-based utility measures (such as uncertainty) to assess individual instances and label the ones with the maximum values for training. In this paper, we argue that such approaches cannot produce good labeling subsets mainly because instances are evaluated independently without considering their interactions, and individuals with maximal ability do not necessarily form an optimal instance subset for learning. Alternatively, we propose to achieve AL with optimal subset selection (ALOSS), where the key is to find an instance subset with a maximum utility value. To achieve the goal, ALOSS simultaneously considers the following: 1) the importance of individual instances and 2) the disparity between instances, to build an instance-correlation matrix. As a result, AL is transformed to a semidefinite programming problem to select a
$k$
-instance subset with a maximum utility value. Experimental results demonstrate that ALOSS outperforms state-of-the-art approaches for AL.