Stream-based joint exploration-exploitation active learning

Learning from streams of evolving and unbounded data is an important problem, for example in visual surveillance or internet scale data. For such large and evolving real-world data, exhaustive supervision is impractical, particularly so when the full space of classes is not known in advance therefore joint class discovery (exploration) and boundary learning (exploitation) becomes critical. Active learning has shown promise in jointly optimising exploration-exploitation with minimal human supervision. However, existing active learning methods either rely on heuristic multi-criteria weighting or are limited to batch processing. In this paper, we present a new unified framework for joint exploration-exploitation active learning in streams without any heuristic weighting. Extensive evaluation on classification of various image and surveillance video datasets demonstrates the superiority of our framework over existing methods.