  How can we reuse existing knowledge, in the form of available datasets, when
solving a new and apparently unrelated target task from a set of unlabeled
data? In this work we make a first contribution to answer this question in the
context of image classification. We frame this quest as an active learning
problem and use zero-shot classifiers to guide the learning process by linking
the new task to the existing classifiers. By revisiting the dual formulation of
adaptive SVM, we reveal two basic conditions to choose greedily only the most
relevant samples to be annotated. On this basis we propose an effective active
learning algorithm which learns the best possible target classification model
with minimum human labeling effort. Extensive experiments on two challenging
datasets show the value of our approach compared to the state-of-the-art active
learning methodologies, as well as its potential to reuse past datasets with
minimal effort for future tasks.
