Active Learning

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Overview

Active learning studies how to choose data or queries so models can learn effectively with fewer labels, measurements, or experiments. Common approaches include uncertainty sampling, diversity and coreset selection, Bayesian information gain, batch strategies, and cost-aware or human-in-the-loop querying; scientific applications also use Gaussian processes, multi-fidelity models, and physics-based acquisition to guide simulations and laboratory work. Work spans image and language benchmarks, medical annotation, robotics, and scientific discovery, with newer methods using foundation-model representations and adapting selection to class imbalance, domain shift, or label noise. A central open tension is that no acquisition strategy wins everywhere: gains depend on the task, budget, model and data, and random sampling can match or outperform sophisticated methods, making realistic evaluations and strong baselines essential.

Latest papers

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296 papers39 papers in the last four weeks, up 22% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

  1. Revisiting Active Sequential Prediction-Powered Mean Estimation

    Apr 20, 2026Maria-Eleni Sfyraki, Jun-Kun WangParameter EstimationActive Learning

    University of California San Diego

  2. Bayesian Active Learning with Gaussian Processes Guided by LLM Relevance Scoring for Dense Passage Retrieval

    Apr 20, 2026Junyoung Kim, Anton Korikov, Jiazhou Liang +5Large Language Model-Guided OptimizationActive Learning

    Sungkyunkwan University, Republic of Korea · University of Toronto, Canada

  3. CoAct: Co-Active LLM Preference Learning with Human-AI Synergy

    Apr 19, 2026Ruiyao Xu, Mihir Parmar, Tiankai Yang +3RL for Language ModelsLLM Alignment

    Northwestern University · Google · University of Southern California +1

  4. From Subsumption to Satisfiability: LLM-Assisted Active Learning for OWL Ontologies

    Apr 17, 2026Haoruo Zhao, Wenshuo Tang, Duncan Guthrie +3Active LearningOntology Learning

    University of Glasgow

  5. Boundary-Centric Clip-Budgeted Active Learning for Temporal Action Segmentation

    Apr 16, 2026Halil Ismail Helvaci, Sen-ching Samson CheungTemporal Action SegmentationActive Learning

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA

  6. Do We Still Need Humans in the Loop? Human vs. LLM Annotation in Active Learning for TikTok Hate Speech Detection

    Apr 15, 2026Ahmad Dawar Hakimi, Lea Hirlimann, Isabelle Augenstein +1LLM-Assisted AnnotationHuman-in-the-Loop Annotation

    Center for Information and Language Processing, LMU Munich, Germany · Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark · Munich Center for Machine Learning, Germany

  7. Beyond Uniform Sampling: Synergistic Active Learning and Input Denoising for Robust Neural Operators

    Apr 14, 2026Samrendra Roy, Souvik Chakraborty, Syed Bahauddin AlamAdversarial RobustnessNeural Operators

    Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA · Department of Applied Mechanics, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India · National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

  8. Labeled TrustSet Guided: Batch Active Learning with Reinforcement Learning

    Apr 14, 2026Guofeng Cui, Yang Liu, Pichao Wang +4Active Learning

    Prime Video, Amazon Seattle, USA

  9. Loss-Driven Bayesian Active Learning

    Apr 13, 2026Zhuoyue Huang, Freddie Bickford Smith, Tom RainforthActive Learning

    University of Oxford

  10. Testing the Assumptions of Active Learning for Translation Tasks with Few Samples

    Apr 10, 2026Lorenzo Jaime Yu Flores, Cesare Spinoso di-Piano, Ori Ernst +2Active LearningTraining Data Selection

    Mila - Quebec AI Institute · McGill University

  11. Dynamic Class-Aware Active Learning for Unbiased Satellite Image Segmentation

    Apr 10, 2026Gadi Hemanth Kumar, Athira Nambiar, Pankaj BodaniActive LearningRemote Sensing Image Segmentation

    Department of Computational Intelligence, Faculty of Engineering and Technology, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Kattankulathur 603203, Tamil Nadu, India · Space Applications Centre, Indian Space Research Organisation, Ahmedabad, India

  12. Optimal Centered Active Excitation in Linear System Identification

    Apr 7, 2026Kaito Ito, Alexandre ProutiereSample ComplexityActive Learning

    Department of Information Physics and Computing, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113-8654, Japan · Division of Decision and Control Systems, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm 114 28, Sweden

  13. CoALFake: Collaborative Active Learning with Human-LLM Co-Annotation for Cross-Domain Fake News Detection

    Apr 5, 2026Esma Aïmeur, Gilles Brassard, Dorsaf SallamiFake News DetectionActive Learning

    Department of Computer Science and Operations Research, University of Montreal, Canada.

  14. Multimodal Urban Tree Detection from Satellite and Street-Level Imagery via Annotation-Efficient Deep Learning Strategies

    Apr 3, 2026In Seon Kim, Ali MoghimiMultimodal Object DetectionObject Detection

    Department of Computer Science, University of California, Davis, , Davis, 95616, CA, USA · Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, 95616, USA

  15. Random Is Hard to Beat: Active Selection in online DPO with Modern LLMs

    Apr 3, 2026Giyeong Oh, Junghyun Lee, Jaehyun Park +3Active Preference LearningLanguage Model Post-Training

    Seoul National University · Ewha Womans University · KAIST +1

  16. Feature Weighting Improves Pool-Based Sequential Active Learning for Regression

    Apr 2, 2026Dongrui WuActive Learning

    Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Image Processing and Intelligent Control, and Hubei Key Laboratory of Brain-inspired Intelligent Systems, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074 China.

  17. Revisiting Human-in-the-Loop Object Retrieval with Pre-Trained Vision Transformers

    Apr 1, 2026Kawtar Zaher, Olivier Buisson, Alexis JolyHuman-in-the-Loop AIHuman-in-the-Loop Annotation

    Institut National de l’Audiovisuel INA, Paris, France · Institut National de Recherche et Informatique et Robotique INRIA, Montpellier, France

  18. Mind the Gap: A Framework for Assessing Pitfalls in Multimodal Active Learning

    Mar 31, 2026Dustin Eisenhardt, Yunhee Jeong, Florian BuettnerActive LearningModality Imbalance

    German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany · German Cancer Consortium (DKTK), partner site Frankfurt/Mainz, a partnership between DKFZ and UCT Frankfurt-Marburg, Frankfurt am Main, Germany · Institute of Informatics, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany +3

  19. Quality-Controlled Active Learning via Gaussian Processes for Robust Structure-Property Learning in Autonomous Microscopy

    Mar 31, 2026Jawad Chowdhury, Ganesh Narasimha, Jan-Chi Yang +4Active LearningPhysics-Informed ML

    Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, 37831, USA. · Department of Physics, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, 70101, Taiwan.

  20. Label-efficient Training Updates for Malware Detection over Time

    Mar 30, 2026Luca Minnei, Cristian Manca, Giorgio Piras +6Malware DetectionActive Learning

    Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Cagliari, Italy · Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering, Sapienza University, Rome, Italy · CINI, Rome, Italy

  21. Active In-Context Learning for Tabular Foundation Models

    Mar 28, 2026Wilailuck Treerath, Fabrizio PittorinoActive LearningTabular ICL

    Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy

  22. Class-Distribution Guided Active Learning for 3D Occupancy Prediction in Autonomous Driving

    Mar 28, 2026Wonjune Kim, In-Jae Lee, Sihwan Hwang +2Active Learning3D Occupancy Prediction

    Robotics Program, KAIST, Daejeon 34141, South Korea · Interdisciplinary Program in Artificial Intelligence, Seoul National University, Seoul 08826, South Korea · Graduate School of Mobility, KAIST, Daejeon 34051, South Korea +1

  23. Overcoming the Incentive Collapse Paradox

    Mar 27, 2026Qichuan Yin, Ziwei Su, Shuangning LiHuman Oversight of AICost-Aware Inference

    Department of Statistics, University of Chicago · Booth School of Business, University of Chicago

  24. Evaluating Interactive 2D Visualization as a Sample Selection Strategy for Biomedical Time-Series Data Annotation

    Mar 27, 2026Einari Vaaras, Manu Airaksinen, Okko RäsänenHuman-in-the-Loop AnnotationActive Learning

    Signal Processing Research Centre, Tampere University, Tampere, 33720, Finland · BABA Center, Department of Physiology, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, 00029, Finland

  25. Label What Matters: Modality-Balanced and Difficulty-Aware Multimodal Active Learning

    Mar 26, 2026Yuqiao Zeng, Xu Wang, Tengfei Liang +3Active LearningMultimodal Classification

    Key Laboratory of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in Transportation, Ministry of Education; State Key Laboratory of Advanced Rail Autonomous Operation; School of Computer and Information Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China · School of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

  26. Positive-First Most Ambiguous: A Simple Active Learning Criterion for Interactive Retrieval of Rare Categories

    Mar 25, 2026Kawtar Zaher, Olivier Buisson, Alexis JolyActive LearningFine-Grained Image Retrieval

    INRIA, LIRMM, Université de Montpellier, France · Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, France

  27. Learning What Can Be Picked: Active Reachability Estimation for Efficient Robotic Fruit Harvesting

    Mar 24, 2026Nur Afsa Syeda, Mohamed Elmahallawy, Luis Fernando de la Torre +1Agricultural RoboticsRobotic Harvesting

    Washington State University, Richland, WA 99354, USA

  28. Conformal Cross-Modal Active Learning

    Mar 24, 2026Huy Hoang Nguyen, Cédric Jung, Shirin Salehi +3Active LearningConformal Prediction

    AIT Austrian Institute of Technology · Automation & Control Institute, Technical University of Vienna · Chair of Information Theory and Data Analytics (INDA), RWTH Aachen University

  29. REALITrees: Rashomon Ensemble Active Learning for Interpretable Trees

    Mar 24, 2026Simon D. Nguyen, Hayden McTavish, Kentaro Hoffman +2PAC-Bayesian TheoryActive Learning

    Department of Statistics, University of Washington · Department of Computer Science, Duke University · Department of Sociology, University of Washington

  30. Multi-Perspective LLM Annotations for Valid Analyses in Subjective Tasks

    Mar 22, 2026Navya Mehrotra, Adam Visokay, Kristina GligorićAnnotator DisagreementLLM-Assisted Annotation

    University of Washington