Diverse active ranking for multimedia search

Interactively learning from a small sample of unlabeled examples is an enormously challenging task, one that often arises in vision applications. Relevance feedback and more recently active learning are two standard techniques that have received much attention towards solving this interactive learning problem. How to best utilize the user's effort for labeling, however, remains unanswered. It has been shown in the past that labeling a diverse set of points is helpful, however, the notion of diversity has either been dependent on the learner used, or computationally expensive. In this paper, we intend to address these issues in the bipartite ranking setting. First, we introduce a scheme for picking the query set which will be labeled by an oracle so that it will aid us in learning the ranker in as few active learning rounds as possible. Secondly, we propose a fundamentally motivated, information theoretic view of diversity and its use in a fast, non-degenerate active learning-based relevance feedback setting. Finally, we report comparative testing and results in a real-time image retrieval setting.