Deep Transfer Active Learning Method Combining Source Domain Difference and Target Domain Uncertainty

Training deep neural network models comes with a heavy labeling cost. To reduce the cost, a deep transfer active learning method combining source domain and target domain is proposed. With the initial model transferred from source task, the current task samples with larger contribution to the model performance improvement are labeled by using a dynamical weighting combination of source domain difference and target domain uncertainty. Information extraction ratio(IER) is concretely defined in the specific case. An IER-based batch training strategy and a T&N batch training strategy are proposed to deal with model training process. The proposed method is tested on two cross-dataset transfer learning experiments. The results show that the transfer active learning method achieves good performance and reduces the cost of annotation effectively and the proposed strategies optimize the distribution of computing resources during the active learning process. Thus, the model learns more times from samples in the early phases and less times in the later and end phases. © 2021, Science Press. All right reserved.