Information-Theoretic Active Learning for Content-Based Image Retrieval
This work addresses the challenge of efficient user feedback acquisition in image retrieval systems, representing an incremental improvement over existing active learning methods.
The authors tackled the problem of acquiring user feedback for content-based image retrieval by proposing Information-Theoretic Active Learning (ITAL), a batch-mode method that maximizes mutual information between predicted relevance and expected feedback, resulting in state-of-the-art performance on datasets like MIRFLICKR and ImageNet.
We propose Information-Theoretic Active Learning (ITAL), a novel batch-mode active learning method for binary classification, and apply it for acquiring meaningful user feedback in the context of content-based image retrieval. Instead of combining different heuristics such as uncertainty, diversity, or density, our method is based on maximizing the mutual information between the predicted relevance of the images and the expected user feedback regarding the selected batch. We propose suitable approximations to this computationally demanding problem and also integrate an explicit model of user behavior that accounts for possible incorrect labels and unnameable instances. Furthermore, our approach does not only take the structure of the data but also the expected model output change caused by the user feedback into account. In contrast to other methods, ITAL turns out to be highly flexible and provides state-of-the-art performance across various datasets, such as MIRFLICKR and ImageNet.