Active-Learning-as-a-Service: An Automatic and Efficient MLOps System for Data-Centric AI

The success of today's AI applications requires not only model training (Model-centric) but also data engineering (Data-centric). In data-centric AI, active learning (AL) plays a vital role, but current AL tools 1) require users to manually select AL strategies, and 2) can not perform AL tasks efficiently. To this end, this paper presents an automatic and efficient MLOps system for AL, named ALaaS (Active-Learning-as-a-Service). Specifically, 1) ALaaS implements an AL agent, including a performance predictor and a workflow controller, to decide the most suitable AL strategies given users' datasets and budgets. We call this a predictive-based successive halving early-stop (PSHEA) procedure. 2) ALaaS adopts a server-client architecture to support an AL pipeline and implements stage-level parallelism for high efficiency. Meanwhile, caching and batching techniques are employed to further accelerate the AL process. In addition to efficiency, ALaaS ensures accessibility with the help of the design philosophy of configuration-as-a-service. Extensive experiments show that ALaaS outperforms all other baselines in terms of latency and throughput. Also, guided by the AL agent, ALaaS can automatically select and run AL strategies for non-expert users under different datasets and budgets. Our code is available at https://github.com/MLSysOps/Active-Learning-as-a-Service.