TEAL: Token-Space Efficient Active Learning for Low-Budget Semantic Segmentation

Apple researchers (with University of Waterloo) introduce TEAL, the first pixel-level active learning framework built on frozen ViT representations, selecting diverse candidates directly on the native token lattice via a two-level MaxHerding strategy plus margin-based uncertainty refinement. With a single labeled pixel per image, TEAL beats the strongest baseline by up to +24.36 mIoU on CamVid, Cityscapes, ADE20K and Pascal Context, reaching up to 97% of fully supervised performance with just 10 px.