Loss-Driven Bayesian Active Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Huang, Zhuoyue, Smith, Freddie Bickford, Rainforth, Tom
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Huang, Zhuoyue
Smith, Freddie Bickford
Rainforth, Tom
author_facet Huang, Zhuoyue
Smith, Freddie Bickford
Rainforth, Tom
contents The central goal of active learning is to gather data that maximises downstream predictive performance, but popular approaches have limited flexibility in customising this data acquisition to different downstream problems and losses. We propose a rigorous loss-driven approach to Bayesian active learning that allows data acquisition to directly target the loss associated with a given decision problem. In particular, we show how any loss can be used to derive a unique objective for optimal data acquisition. Critically, we then show that any loss taking the form of a weighted Bregman divergence permits analytic computation of a central component of its corresponding objective, making the approach applicable in practice. In regression and classification experiments with a range of different losses, we find our approach reduces test losses relative to existing techniques.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_11995
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Loss-Driven Bayesian Active Learning
Huang, Zhuoyue
Smith, Freddie Bickford
Rainforth, Tom
Machine Learning
The central goal of active learning is to gather data that maximises downstream predictive performance, but popular approaches have limited flexibility in customising this data acquisition to different downstream problems and losses. We propose a rigorous loss-driven approach to Bayesian active learning that allows data acquisition to directly target the loss associated with a given decision problem. In particular, we show how any loss can be used to derive a unique objective for optimal data acquisition. Critically, we then show that any loss taking the form of a weighted Bregman divergence permits analytic computation of a central component of its corresponding objective, making the approach applicable in practice. In regression and classification experiments with a range of different losses, we find our approach reduces test losses relative to existing techniques.
title Loss-Driven Bayesian Active Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11995