# TAAL: Test-time Augmentation for Active Learning in Medical Image Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.06624 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06624/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02677/) (2017)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [Deep Bayesian Active Learning with Image Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.02910/) (2017)
- [Deep Batch Active Learning by Diverse, Uncertain Gradient Lower Bounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03671/) (2019)
- [Learning Loss for Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03677/) (2019)
- [Variational Adversarial Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00370/) (2019)
- [Aleatoric uncertainty estimation with test-time augmentation for medical image segmentation with convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.07356/) (2018)
- [Cost-Effective Active Learning for Deep Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.03551/) (2017)
- [A Survey on Active Learning and Human-in-the-Loop Deep Learning for Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02923/) (2019)
- [Suggestive Annotation: A Deep Active Learning Framework for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04737/) (2017)
- [Consistency-based Semi-supervised Active Learning: Towards Minimizing Labeling Cost](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07153/) (2019)
- [ViewAL: Active Learning with Viewpoint Entropy for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11789/) (2019)
- [Task-Aware Variational Adversarial Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04709/) (2020)
- [Reinforced active learning for image segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06583/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Brain Lesion Segmentation with an Adapted Mean Teacher Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01248/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Active Learning with Temporal Output Discrepancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14153/) (2021)
- [Diminishing Uncertainty within the Training Pool: Active Learning for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02323/) (2021)
- [Geometry in Active Learning for Binary and Multi-class Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09029/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Active learning for medical image segmentation with stochastic batches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07670/) (2023)
- [Tyche: Stochastic In-Context Learning for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13650/) (2024)
- [COLosSAL: A Benchmark for Cold-start Active Learning for 3D Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12004/) (2023)
- [VLM-CPL: Consensus Pseudo Labels from Vision-Language Models for Annotation-Free Pathological Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15836/) (2024)
- [BayTTA: Uncertainty-aware medical image classification with optimized test-time augmentation using Bayesian model averaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17640/) (2024)
- [An Uncertainty-guided Tiered Self-training Framework for Active Source-free Domain Adaptation in Prostate Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02893/) (2024)
- [FIESTA: Fourier-Based Semantic Augmentation with Uncertainty Guidance for Enhanced Domain Generalizability in Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14308/) (2024)
- [Deep Nets with Subsampling Layers Unwittingly Discard Useful Activations at Test-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01083/) (2024)
- [Finally Outshining the Random Baseline: A Simple and Effective Solution for Active Learning in 3D Biomedical Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13677/) (2026)
- [Value bounds and Convergence Analysis for Averages of LRP attributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08963/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning methods typically depend on the availability of labeled data, which is expensive and time-consuming to obtain. Active learning addresses such effort by prioritizing which samples are best to annotate in order to maximize the performance of the task model. While frameworks for active learning have been widely explored in the context of classification of natural images, they have been only sparsely used in medical image segmentation. The challenge resides in obtaining an uncertainty measure that reveals the best candidate data for annotation. This paper proposes Test-time Augmentation for Active Learning (TAAL), a novel semi-supervised active learning approach for segmentation that exploits the uncertainty information offered by data transformations. Our method applies cross-augmentation consistency during training and inference to both improve model learning in a semi-supervised fashion and identify the most relevant unlabeled samples to annotate next. In addition, our consistency loss uses a modified version of the JSD to further improve model performance. By relying on data transformations rather than on external modules or simple heuristics typically used in uncertainty-based strategies, TAAL emerges as a simple, yet powerful task-agnostic semi-supervised active learning approach applicable to the medical domain. Our results on a publicly-available dataset of cardiac images show that TAAL outperforms existing baseline methods in both fully-supervised and semi-supervised settings. Our implementation is publicly available on https://github.com/melinphd/TAAL.