Active Learning with a Noisy Annotator
Netta Shafir, Guy Hacohen, Daphna Weinshall · Qeios · 2025
Active Learning (AL) aims to reduce annotation costs by strategically selecting the most informative samples for labeling. However, most active learning methods struggle in the low-budget regime where only a few labeled examples are available. This issue becomes even more pronounced when annotators provide noisy labels. A common AL approach for the low- and mid-budget regimes focuses on maximizing the coverage of the labeled set across the entire dataset. We propose a novel framework called _Noise-Aware Active Sampling (NAS)_ that extends existing greedy, coverage-based active learning strategies to handle noisy annotations. _NAS_ identifies regions that remain uncovered due to the selection of noisy representatives and enables resampling from these areas. We introduce a simple yet effective noise filtering approach suitable for the low-budget regime, which leverages the inner mechanism of _NAS_ and can be applied for noise filtering before model training. On multiple computer vision benchmarks, including CIFAR100 and ImageNet subsets, _NAS_ significantly improves performance for standard active learning methods across different noise types and rates.