# Using Sum-Product Networks to Assess Uncertainty in Deep Active Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.09798 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09798/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [Deep Bayesian Active Learning with Image Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.02910/) (2017)
- [A Review of Uncertainty Quantification in Deep Learning: Techniques, Applications and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06225/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Deep Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.00236/) (2020)
- [BatchBALD: Efficient and Diverse Batch Acquisition for Deep Bayesian Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08158/) (2019)
- [Beyond temperature scaling: Obtaining well-calibrated multiclass probabilities with Dirichlet calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12656/) (2019)
- [Variational Adversarial Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00370/) (2019)
- [Cost-Effective Active Learning for Deep Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.03551/) (2017)
- [A Comparative Survey of Deep Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13450/) (2022)
- [Bayesian Batch Active Learning as Sparse Subset Approximation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02144/) (2019)
- [Rethinking deep active learning: Using unlabeled data at model training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08177/) (2019)
- [PT4AL: Using Self-Supervised Pretext Tasks for Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07459/) (2022)
- [On the Relationship between Sum-Product Networks and Bayesian Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.01239/) (2015)
- [Probabilistic Deep Learning using Random Sum-Product Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01910/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The success of deep active learning hinges on the choice of an effective acquisition function, which ranks not yet labeled data points according to their expected informativeness. Many acquisition functions are (partly) based on the uncertainty that the current model has about the class label of a point, yet there is no generally agreed upon strategy for computing such uncertainty. This paper proposes a new and very simple approach to computing uncertainty in deep active learning with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The main idea is to use the feature representation extracted by the CNN as data for training a Sum-Product Network (SPN). Since SPNs are typically used for estimating the distribution of a dataset, they are well suited to the task of estimating class probabilities that can be used directly by standard acquisition functions such as max entropy and variational ratio. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated in an experimental study on several standard benchmark datasets for image classification, where we compare it to various state-of-the-art methods for assessing uncertainty in deep active learning.