  Active learning aims to reduce the high labeling cost involved in training
machine learning models on large datasets by efficiently labeling only the most
informative samples. Recently, deep active learning has shown success on
various tasks. However, the conventional evaluation scheme used for deep active
learning is below par. Current methods disregard some apparent parallel work in
the closely related fields. Active learning methods are quite sensitive w.r.t.
changes in the training procedure like data augmentation. They improve by a
large-margin when integrated with semi-supervised learning, but barely perform
better than the random baseline. We re-implement various latest active learning
approaches for image classification and evaluate them under more realistic
settings. We further validate our findings for semantic segmentation. Based on
our observations, we realistically assess the current state of the field and
propose a more suitable evaluation protocol.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition