Papers › Bayesian Active Learning By Distribution Disagreement

Bayesian Active Learning By Distribution Disagreement

2 Jan 2025arXiv:2501.01248archive 2025-07-28

Thorben Werner, Lars Schmidt-Thieme

Active Learning (AL) for regression has been systematically under-researched due to the increased difficulty of measuring uncertainty in regression models. Since normalizing flows offer a full predictive distribution instead of a point forecast, they facilitate direct usage of known heuristics for AL like Entropy or Least-Confident sampling. However, we show that most of these heuristics do not work well for normalizing flows in pool-based AL and we need more sophisticated algorithms to distinguish between aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. In this work we propose BALSA, an adaptation of the BALD algorithm, tailored for regression with normalizing flows. With this work we extend current research on uncertainty quantification with normalizing flows \cite{berry2023normalizing, berry2023escaping} to real world data and pool-based AL with multiple acquisition functions and query sizes. We report SOTA results for BALSA across 4 different datasets and 2 different architectures.

PaperPDFCode

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Active LearningUncertainty Quantificationregression

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Normalizing Flows

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections