From internal representations to model improvement through prediction errors

Yushi Nakaya, Kenichi Higuchi, Shuichi Ishida

With limited annotation budgets, choosing which images to label determines how much a model improves. Data-selection methods that use features from a separately trained model, or scene descriptions written by vision-language models, have been successful, but those signals do not directly capture changes in the model being improved. The target model's own internal features reflect what it has learned so far and change with retraining, making them a natural cue for choosing the next training data. However, feature rarity alone does not reveal the errors that matter for performance. Here we link internal features to prediction errors and their expected impact on performance and select images for labeling and retraining without using labels for candidate images. We evaluated the method with an object detector on two datasets and two pairs of random seeds. Adding internal features improved the identification of prediction errors in 15 of 16 conditions. When performance was averaged over successive labeling rounds, the method outperformed selection based only on feature rarity in all four evaluation settings and ranked among the top two of six methods. With other conditions held fixed,…