Collaborative Active Visual Recognition from Crowds: A Distributed Ensemble Approach

Active learning is an effective way of engaging users to interactively train models for visual recognition more efficiently. The vast majority of previous works focused on active learning with a single human oracle. The problem of active learning with multiple oracles in a collaborative setting has not been well explored. We present a collaborative computational model for active learning with multiple human oracles, the input from whom may possess different levels of noises. It leads to not only an ensemble kernel machine that is robust to label noises, but also a principled label quality measure to online detect irresponsible labelers. Instead of running independent active learning processes for each individual human oracle, our model captures the inherent correlations among the labelers through shared data among them. Our experiments with both simulated and real crowd-sourced noisy labels demonstrate the efficacy of our model.