Author name cluster

Xueying Zhan

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

5 papers

2 author rows

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

AutoAL: Automated Active Learning with Differentiable Query Strategy Search

Yifeng Wang
Xueying Zhan
Siyu Huang

As deep learning continues to evolve, the need for data efficiency becomes increasingly important. Considering labeling large datasets is both time-consuming and expensive, active learning (AL) provides a promising solution to this challenge by iteratively selecting the most informative subsets of examples to train deep neural networks, thereby reducing the labeling cost. However, the effectiveness of different AL algorithms can vary significantly across data scenarios, and determining which AL algorithm best fits a given task remains a challenging problem. This work presents the first differentiable AL strategy search method, named AutoAL, which is designed on top of existing AL sampling strategies. AutoAL consists of two neural nets, named SearchNet and FitNet, which are optimized concurrently under a differentiable bi-level optimization framework. For any given task, SearchNet and FitNet are iteratively co-optimized using the labeled data, learning how well a set of candidate AL algorithms perform on that task. With the optimal AL strategies identified, SearchNet selects a small subset from the unlabeled pool for querying their annotations, enabling efficient training of the task model. Experimental results demonstrate that AutoAL consistently achieves superior accuracy compared to all candidate AL algorithms and other selective AL approaches, showcasing its potential for adapting and integrating multiple existing AL methods across diverse tasks and domains.

Details

AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Deep Active Learning with Noise Stability

Xingjian Li
Pengkun Yang
Yangcheng Gu
Xueying Zhan
Tianyang Wang
Min Xu
Chengzhong Xu

Uncertainty estimation for unlabeled data is crucial to active learning. With a deep neural network employed as the backbone model, the data selection process is highly challenging due to the potential over-confidence of the model inference. Existing methods resort to special learning fashions (e.g. adversarial) or auxiliary models to address this challenge. This tends to result in complex and inefficient pipelines, which would render the methods impractical. In this work, we propose a novel algorithm that leverages noise stability to estimate data uncertainty. The key idea is to measure the output derivation from the original observation when the model parameters are randomly perturbed by noise. We provide theoretical analyses by leveraging the small Gaussian noise theory and demonstrate that our method favors a subset with large and diverse gradients. Our method is generally applicable in various tasks, including computer vision, natural language processing, and structural data analysis. It achieves competitive performance compared against state-of-the-art active learning baselines.

PDF Details DOI

TMLR Journal 2023 Journal Article

Pareto Optimization for Active Learning under Out-of-Distribution Data Scenarios

Xueying Zhan
Zeyu Dai
Qingzhong Wang
Qing Li
Haoyi Xiong
Dejing Dou
Antoni B. Chan

Pool-based Active Learning (AL) has proven successful in minimizing labeling costs by sequentially selecting the most informative unlabeled data from large pool and querying their labels from an oracle or annotators. However, existing AL sampling schemes may not perform well in out-of-distribution (OOD) data scenarios, where the unlabeled data pool contains samples that do not belong to the pre-defined categories of the target task. Achieving strong AL performance under OOD data scenarios presents a challenge due to the inherent conflict between AL sampling strategies and OOD data detection. For instance, both more informative in-distribution (ID) data and OOD data in an unlabeled data pool would be assigned high informativeness scores (e.g., high entropy) during AL processes. To address this dilemma, we propose a Monte-Carlo Pareto Optimization for Active Learning (POAL) sampling scheme, which selects optimal subsets of unlabeled samples with fixed batch size from the unlabeled data pool. We formulate the AL sampling task as a multi-objective optimization problem and employ Pareto optimization based on two conflicting objectives: (1) the conventional AL sampling scheme (e.g., maximum entropy) and (2) the confidence of excluding OOD data samples. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our POAL approach on classical Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) tasks.

PDF Details

UAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Asymptotic optimality for active learning processes

Xueying Zhan
Yaowei Wang 0001
Antoni B. Chan

Active Learning (AL) aims to optimize basic learned model(s) iteratively by selecting and annotating unlabeled data samples that are deemed to best maximise the model performance with minimal required data. However, the learned model is easy to overfit due to the biased distribution (sampling bias and dataset shift) formed by non-uniform sampling used in AL. Considering AL as an iterative sequential optimization process, we first provide a perspective on AL in terms of statistical properties, i. e. , asymptotic unbiasedness, consistency and asymptotic efficiency, with respect to basic estimators when the sample size (size of labeled set) becomes large, and in the limit as sample size tends to infinity. We then discuss how biases affect AL. Finally, we proposed a flexible AL framework that aims to mitigate the impact of bias in AL by minimizing generalization error and importance-weighted training loss simultaneously.

Details

IJCAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

A Comparative Survey: Benchmarking for Pool-based Active Learning

Xueying Zhan
Huan Liu
Qing Li
Antoni B. Chan

Active learning (AL) is a subfield of machine learning (ML) in which a learning algorithm aims to achieve good accuracy with fewer training samples by interactively querying the oracles to label new data points. Pool-based AL is well-motivated in many ML tasks, where unlabeled data is abundant, but their labels are hard or costly to obtain. Although many pool-based AL methods have been developed, some important questions remain unanswered such as how to: 1) determine the current state-of-the-art technique; 2) evaluate the relative benefit of new methods for various properties of the dataset; 3) understand what specific problems merit greater attention; and 4) measure the progress of the field over time. In this paper, we survey and compare various AL strategies used in both recently proposed and classic highly-cited methods. We propose to benchmark pool-based AL methods with a variety of datasets and quantitative metric, and draw insights from the comparative empirical results.

PDF Details DOI