Collaborative Active Learning of a Kernel Machine Ensemble for Recognition

Gang Hua, Chengjiang Long, Ming Yang, Yan Gao; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013, pp. 1209-1216

Active learning is an effective way of engaging users to interactively train models for visual recognition. The vast majority of previous works, if not all of them, focused on active learning with a single human oracle. The problem of active learning with multiple oracles in a collaborative setting has not been well explored. Moreover, most of the previous works assume that the labels provided by the human oracles are noise free, which may often be violated in reality. We present a collaborative computational model for active learning with multiple human oracles. It leads to not only an ensemble kernel machine that is robust to label noises, but also a principled label quality measure to online detect irresponsible labelers. Instead of running independent active learning processes for each individual human oracle, our model captures the inherent correlations among the labelers through shared data among them. Our simulation experiments and experiments with real crowd-sourced noisy labels demonstrated the efficacy of our model.