Distribution-Aware Energy Minimization: Physical-Inspired Efficient Active Learning and Quantum Potentials
Distribution-Aware Energy Minimization: Physical-Inspired Efficient Active Learning and Quantum Potentials
Zhicheng Yao, Wenguo Yang, Yancheng Chen, Dun Ma, Shengminjie Chen, Xiaoming Sun
Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 2019-2027.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/225
Active learning aims to maximize model performance with minimal annotation costs by selecting the most informative samples from large unlabeled pools, which often face a budget dilemma: uncertainty-based methods induce redundancy under low budgets, while representativeness-based methods struggle to mine challenging samples under high budgets. Although some heuristic parameter interpolation schemes attempt to bridge this gap, such strategies suffer from a misalignment between theoretical assumptions and real-world distributions, failing to achieve a good exploration-exploitation balance across all scenarios. In this paper, we propose a general active learning framework based on Distribution-Aware Energy Minimization, which reformulates sample selection as minimizing the energy function for the distributional discrepancy between the selected subset and the global uncertainty field. This physical-inspired perspective naturally derives a Hamiltonian comprising attractive terms and repulsive terms, mathematically achieving an intrinsic and dynamic balance between uncertainty and representativeness. Furthermore, we transform the optimization objective to the ground-state search of an Ising Model, enabling efficient solutions via Coherent Ising Machine. Extensive numerical experiments show that our method outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods across multi-budget regimes on several benchmark datasets. Validation on a real quantum hardware also demonstrates the potential for quantum computer in future large-scale selection tasks.
Keywords:
Computer Vision: Efficiency and Optimization
Machine Learning: Active learning
Machine Learning: Supervised Learning
