More Like this

1. Mindful Active Learning

   https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/314  

   Esna Ashari, Zhila; Ghasemzadeh, Hassan (August 2019, In Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   null (Ed.)

   We propose a novel active learning framework for activity recognition using wearable sensors. Our work is unique in that it takes physical and cognitive limitations of the oracle into account when selecting sensor data to be annotated by the oracle. Our approach is inspired by human-beings' limited capacity to respond to external stimulus such as responding to a prompt on their mobile devices. This capacity constraint is manifested not only in the number of queries that a person can respond to in a given time-frame but also in the lag between the time that a query is made and when it is responded to. We introduce the notion of mindful active learning and propose a computational framework, called EMMA, to maximize the active learning performance taking informativeness of sensor data, query budget, and human memory into account. We formulate this optimization problem, propose an approach to model memory retention, discuss complexity of the problem, and propose a greedy heuristic to solve the problem. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on three publicly available datasets and by simulating oracles with various memory strengths. We show that the activity recognition accuracy ranges from 21% to 97% depending on memory strength, query budget, and difficulty of the machine learning task. Our results also indicate that EMMA achieves an accuracy level that is, on average, 13.5% higher than the case when only informativeness of the sensor data is considered for active learning. Additionally, we show that the performance of our approach is at most 20% less than experimental upper-bound and up to 80% higher than experimental lower-bound. We observe that mindful active learning is most beneficial when query budget is small and/or oracle's memory is weak, thus emphasizing contributions of our work in human-centered mobile health settings and for elderly with cognitive impairments. 

   more » « less
2. Cost-Effective Multitask Active Learning in Wearable Sensor Systems

   https://doi.org/10.3390/s25051522  

   Arefeen, Asiful; Ghasemzadeh, Hassan (March 2025, Sensors)

   Multitask learning models provide benefits by reducing model complexity and improving accuracy by concurrently learning multiple tasks with shared representations. Leveraging inductive knowledge transfer, these models mitigate the risk of overfitting on any specific task, leading to enhanced overall performance. However, supervised multitask learning models, like many neural networks, require substantial amounts of labeled data. Given the cost associated with data labeling, there is a need for an efficient label acquisition mechanism, known as multitask active learning (MTAL). In wearable sensor systems, success of MTAL largely hinges on its query strategies because active learning in such settings involves interaction with end-users (e.g., patients) for annotation. However, these strategies have not been studied in mobile health settings and wearable systems to date. While strategies like one-sided sampling, alternating sampling, and rank-combination-based sampling have been proposed in the past, their applicability in mobile sensor settings—a domain constrained by label deficit—remains largely unexplored. This study investigates the MTAL querying approaches and addresses crucial questions related to the choice of sampling methods and the effectiveness of multitask learning in mobile health applications. Utilizing two datasets on activity recognition and emotion classification, our findings reveal that rank-based sampling outperforms other techniques, particularly in tasks with high correlation. However, sole reliance on informativeness for sample selection may introduce biases into models. To address this issue, we also propose a Clustered Stratified Sampling (CSS) method in tandem with the multitask active learning query process. CSS identifies clustered mini-batches of samples, optimizing budget utilization and maximizing performance. When employed alongside rank-based query selection, our proposed CSS algorithm demonstrates up to 9% improvement in accuracy over traditional querying approaches for a 2000-query budget. 

   more » « less
3. Batch Active Learning with Graph Neural Networks via Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning

   Yuheng Zhang, Hanghang Tong (April 2022, AAAI 2022)

   Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved tremendous success in many graph learning tasks such as node classifica- tion, graph classification and link prediction. For the classifi- cation task, GNNs’ performance often highly depends on the number of labeled nodes and thus could be significantly ham- pered due to the expensive annotation cost. The sparse litera- ture on active learning for GNNs has primarily focused on se- lecting only one sample each iteration, which becomes ineffi- cient for large scale datasets. In this paper, we study the batch active learning setting for GNNs where the learning agent can acquire labels of multiple samples at each time. We formu- late batch active learning as a cooperative multi-agent rein- forcement learning problem and present a novel reinforced batch-mode active learning framework (BIGENE). To avoid the combinatorial explosion of the joint action space, we in- troduce a value decomposition method that factorizes the to- tal Q-value into the average of individual Q-values. More- over, we propose a novel multi-agent Q-network consisting of a graph convolutional network (GCN) component and a gated recurrent unit (GRU) component. The GCN compo- nent takes both the informativeness and inter-dependences between nodes into account and the GRU component enables the agent to consider interactions between selected nodes in the same batch. Experimental results on multiple public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method. 

   more » « less
4. Active metric learning and classification using similarity queries

   Nadagouda, Namrata; Xu, Austin; Davenport, Mark A. (August 2023, Proceedings of the Thirty-Ninth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence)

   Active learning is commonly used to train label-efficient models by adaptively selecting the most informative queries. However, most active learning strategies are designed to either learn a representation of the data (e.g., embedding or metric learning) or perform well on a task (e.g., classification) on the data. However, many machine learning tasks involve a combination of both representation learning and a task-specific goal. Motivated by this, we propose a novel unified query framework that can be applied to any problem in which a key component is learning a representation of the data that reflects similarity. Our approach builds on similarity or nearest neighbor (NN) queries which seek to select samples that result in improved embeddings. The queries consist of a reference and a set of objects, with an oracle selecting the object most similar (i.e., nearest) to the reference. In order to reduce the number of solicited queries, they are chosen adaptively according to an information theoretic criterion. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy on two tasks - active metric learning and active classification - using a variety of synthetic and real world datasets. In particular, we demonstrate that actively selected NN queries outperform recently developed active triplet selection methods in a deep metric learning setting. Further, we show that in classification, actively selecting class labels can be reformulated as a process of selecting the most informative NN query, allowing direct application of our method. 

   more » « less
5. Composite Active Learning: Towards Multi-Domain Active Learning with Theoretical Guarantees

   https://doi.org/10.1609/AAAI.V38I11.29119  

   Hao, Guang-Yuan; Huang, Hengguan; Wang, Haotian; Gao, Jie; Wang, Hao (March 2024, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   Active learning (AL) aims to improve model performance within a fixed labeling budget by choosing the most informative data points to label. Existing AL focuses on the single-domain setting, where all data come from the same domain (e.g., the same dataset). However, many real-world tasks often involve multiple domains. For example, in visual recognition, it is often desirable to train an image classifier that works across different environments (e.g., different backgrounds), where images from each environment constitute one domain. Such a multi-domain AL setting is challenging for prior methods because they (1) ignore the similarity among different domains when assigning labeling budget and (2) fail to handle distribution shift of data across different domains. In this paper, we propose the first general method, dubbed composite active learning (CAL), for multi-domain AL. Our approach explicitly considers the domain-level and instance-level information in the problem; CAL first assigns domain-level budgets according to domain-level importance, which is estimated by optimizing an upper error bound that we develop; with the domain-level budgets, CAL then leverages a certain instance-level query strategy to select samples to label from each domain. Our theoretical analysis shows that our method achieves a better error bound compared to current AL methods. Our empirical results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art AL methods on both synthetic and real-world multi-domain datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/multi-domain-active-learning. 

   more » « less