Conceptual

BALSA: Active Learning for Regression by Distribution Disagreement

A pool-based active-learning method for regression models that output full predictive distributions (normalizing flows, Gaussian neural networks). BALSA extends the BALD acquisition rule by measuring disagreement between Monte-Carlo-dropout-sampled predictive distributions directly, using KL-divergence or Earth Mover's (Wasserstein) distance rather than collapsing them to scalar entropy or standard deviation. This better isolates epistemic from aleatoric uncertainty and yields state-of-the-art acquisition performance across four real-world regression datasets.