# Large-Scale Visual Active Learning with Deep Probabilistic Ensembles

Source: [Large-Scale Visual Active Learning with Deep Probabilistic Ensembles](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa65641e209131cea09ebc>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-25T21:25:53.160Z

Authors: Kashyap Chitta, Jose M. Alvarez, Adam Lesnikowski

Published: 2018-11-08T17:56:43.000Z

## Abstract

Annotating the right data for training deep neural networks is an important challenge. Active learning using uncertainty estimates from Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) could provide an effective solution to this. Despite being theoretically principled, BNNs require approximations to be applied to large-scale problems, where both performance and uncertainty estimation are crucial. In this paper, we introduce Deep Probabilistic Ensembles (DPEs), a scalable technique that uses a regularized ensemble to approximate a deep BNN. We conduct a series of large-scale visual active learning experiments to evaluate DPEs on classification with the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets, and semantic segmentation with the BDD100k dataset. Our models require significantly less training data to achieve competitive performances, and steadily improve upon strong active learning baselines as the annotation budget is increased.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03575>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.03575.pdf>)
