Deep Active Learning with a Neural Architecture Search

Yonatan Geifman, Ran El-Yaniv

Published 2018-11-19, updated 2019-09-05Version 2

We consider active learning of deep neural networks. Most active learning works in this context have focused on studying effective querying mechanisms and assumed that an appropriate network architecture is a priori known for the problem at hand. We challenge this assumption and propose a novel active strategy whereby the learning algorithm searches for effective architectures on the fly, while actively learning. We apply our strategy using three known querying techniques (softmax response, MC-dropout, and coresets) and show that the proposed approach overwhelmingly outperforms active learning using fixed architectures.