Sai Vikas Desai

Akshay L Chandra, Sai Vikas Desai, Chaitanya Devaguptapu et al.

Active Learning (AL) techniques aim to minimize the training data required to train a model for a given task. Pool-based AL techniques start with a small initial labeled pool and then iteratively pick batches of the most informative samples for labeling. Generally, the initial pool is sampled randomly and labeled to seed the AL iterations. While recent studies have focused on evaluating the robustness of various query functions in AL, little to no attention has been given to the design of the initial labeled pool for deep active learning. Given the recent successes of learning representations in self-supervised/unsupervised ways, we study if an intelligently sampled initial labeled pool can improve deep AL performance. We investigate the effect of intelligently sampled initial labeled pools, including the use of self-supervised and unsupervised strategies, on deep AL methods. The setup, hypotheses, methodology, and implementation details were evaluated by peer review before experiments were conducted. Experimental results could not conclusively prove that intelligently sampled initial pools are better for AL than random initial pools in the long run, although a Variational Autoencoder-based initial pool sampling strategy showed interesting trends that merit deeper investigation.

Akshay L Chandra, Sai Vikas Desai, Wei Guo et al.

In light of growing challenges in agriculture with ever growing food demand across the world, efficient crop management techniques are necessary to increase crop yield. Precision agriculture techniques allow the stakeholders to make effective and customized crop management decisions based on data gathered from monitoring crop environments. Plant phenotyping techniques play a major role in accurate crop monitoring. Advancements in deep learning have made previously difficult phenotyping tasks possible. This survey aims to introduce the reader to the state of the art research in deep plant phenotyping.

Sai Vikas Desai, Akshay L Chandra, Wei Guo et al.

Active learning approaches in computer vision generally involve querying strong labels for data. However, previous works have shown that weak supervision can be effective in training models for vision tasks while greatly reducing annotation costs. Using this knowledge, we propose an adaptive supervision framework for active learning and demonstrate its effectiveness on the task of object detection. Instead of directly querying bounding box annotations (strong labels) for the most informative samples, we first query weak labels and optimize the model. Using a switching condition, the required supervision level can be increased. Our framework requires little to no change in model architecture. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed framework can be used to train good generalizable models with much lesser annotation costs than the state of the art active learning approaches for object detection.