# Similarity Search for Efficient Active Learning and Search of Rare Concepts Source: [Similarity Search for Efficient Active Learning and Search of Rare Concepts]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-25T23:24:37.002Z Authors: Cody Coleman, Edward Chou, Julian Katz-Samuels, Sean Culatana, Peter Bailis, Alexander C. Berg, Robert Nowak, Roshan Sumbaly, Matei Zaharia, I. Zeki Yalniz Published: 2020-06-30T19:46:10.000Z ## Abstract Many active learning and search approaches are intractable for large-scale industrial settings with billions of unlabeled examples. Existing approaches search globally for the optimal examples to label, scaling linearly or even quadratically with the unlabeled data. In this paper, we improve the computational efficiency of active learning and search methods by restricting the candidate pool for labeling to the nearest neighbors of the currently labeled set instead of scanning over all of the unlabeled data. We evaluate several selection strategies in this setting on three large-scale computer vision datasets: ImageNet, OpenImages, and a de-identified and aggregated dataset of 10 billion images provided by a large internet company. Our approach achieved similar mean average precision and recall as the traditional global approach while reducing the computational cost of selection by up to three orders of magnitude, thus enabling web-scale active learning. ## 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]() [PDF]()