Looking Back on the Past: Active Learning with Historical Evaluation Results : Extended Abstract

Active learning is effective for tasks with limited labeled data by annotating a small set of data actively. It utilizes the current trained model to evaluate all unlabeled samples and annotates the best samples scored by a specific query strategy to update the underlying model iteratively. Most active learning approaches rely on only the current evaluation score but ignore the results from previous iterations. In this paper, we propose using more historical evaluation results which can provide additional information to help better select samples. First, we apply two heuristic features of the historical evaluation results, i.e. the weighted sum and the fluctuation of history sequences. Next, to make fuller use of the information contained in the historical results, we design a query strategy that learns to select samples based on the history sequence automatically. Our proposed idea is general and can be combined with both basic and state-of-the-art query strategies to achieve improvements. Experimental results show that our methods significantly promote existing methods.