Calibrated Uncertainty Sampling for Active Learning

Ha Manh Bui; Iliana Maifeld-Carucci; Anqi Liu

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arXiv · 2510.03162

Calibrated Uncertainty Sampling for Active Learning

Ha Manh Bui·Iliana Maifeld-Carucci·Anqi Liu

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Abstract

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.

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Ha Manh Bui, Iliana Maifeld-Carucci, Anqi Liu. 2025-10-03. Calibrated Uncertainty Sampling for Active Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03162

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