Calibrated Uncertainty Sampling for Active Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Bui, Ha Manh, Maifeld-Carucci, Iliana, Liu, Anqi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Bui, Ha Manh
Maifeld-Carucci, Iliana
Liu, Anqi
author_facet Bui, Ha Manh
Maifeld-Carucci, Iliana
Liu, Anqi
contents We study the problem of actively learning a classifier with a low calibration error. One of the most popular Acquisition Functions (AFs) in pool-based Active Learning (AL) is querying by the model's uncertainty. However, we recognize that an uncalibrated uncertainty model on the unlabeled pool may significantly affect the AF effectiveness, leading to sub-optimal generalization and high calibration error on unseen data. Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) make it even worse as the model uncertainty from DNN is usually uncalibrated. Therefore, we propose a new AF by estimating calibration errors and query samples with the highest calibration error before leveraging DNN uncertainty. Specifically, we utilize a kernel calibration error estimator under the covariate shift and formally show that AL with this AF eventually leads to a bounded calibration error on the unlabeled pool and unseen test data. Empirically, our proposed method surpasses other AF baselines by having a lower calibration and generalization error across pool-based AL settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_03162
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Calibrated Uncertainty Sampling for Active Learning
Bui, Ha Manh
Maifeld-Carucci, Iliana
Liu, Anqi
Machine Learning
We study the problem of actively learning a classifier with a low calibration error. One of the most popular Acquisition Functions (AFs) in pool-based Active Learning (AL) is querying by the model's uncertainty. However, we recognize that an uncalibrated uncertainty model on the unlabeled pool may significantly affect the AF effectiveness, leading to sub-optimal generalization and high calibration error on unseen data. Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) make it even worse as the model uncertainty from DNN is usually uncalibrated. Therefore, we propose a new AF by estimating calibration errors and query samples with the highest calibration error before leveraging DNN uncertainty. Specifically, we utilize a kernel calibration error estimator under the covariate shift and formally show that AL with this AF eventually leads to a bounded calibration error on the unlabeled pool and unseen test data. Empirically, our proposed method surpasses other AF baselines by having a lower calibration and generalization error across pool-based AL settings.
title Calibrated Uncertainty Sampling for Active Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03162