When Active Learning Fails, Uncalibrated Out of Distribution Uncertainty Quantification Might Be the Problem

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17760v1
• Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2025 20:17:46 GMT
• Title: When Active Learning Fails, Uncalibrated Out of Distribution Uncertainty Quantification Might Be the Problem
• Authors: Ashley S. Dale, Kangming Li, Brian DeCost, Hao Wan, Yuchen Han, Yao Fehlis, Jason Hattrick-Simpers,
• Abstract summary: Uncertainty estimation and calibration methods are evaluated for active learning campaigns in materials discovery.<n>Uncertainty calibration methods were found to variably generalize from in-domain data to out-of-domain data.<n>The impact of poor-quality uncertainty persists for random forest and eXtreme Gradient Boosting models trained on the same data for the same tasks.
• Score: 2.3348738689737503
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Efficiently and meaningfully estimating prediction uncertainty is important for exploration in active learning campaigns in materials discovery, where samples with high uncertainty are interpreted as containing information missing from the model. In this work, the effect of different uncertainty estimation and calibration methods are evaluated for active learning when using ensembles of ALIGNN, eXtreme Gradient Boost, Random Forest, and Neural Network model architectures. We compare uncertainty estimates from ALIGNN deep ensembles to loss landscape uncertainty estimates obtained for solubility, bandgap, and formation energy prediction tasks. We then evaluate how the quality of the uncertainty estimate impacts an active learning campaign that seeks model generalization to out-of-distribution data. Uncertainty calibration methods were found to variably generalize from in-domain data to out-of-domain data. Furthermore, calibrated uncertainties were generally unsuccessful in reducing the amount of data required by a model to improve during an active learning campaign on out-of-distribution data when compared to random sampling and uncalibrated uncertainties. The impact of poor-quality uncertainty persists for random forest and eXtreme Gradient Boosting models trained on the same data for the same tasks, indicating that this is at least partially intrinsic to the data and not due to model capacity alone. Analysis of the target, in-distribution uncertainty, out-of-distribution uncertainty, and training residual distributions suggest that future work focus on understanding empirical uncertainties in the feature input space for cases where ensemble prediction variances do not accurately capture the missing information required for the model to generalize.

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