Correcting Boundary Bias and Observation Independence in Bayesian Experimental Design

arXiv:2602.01898 · cs.LG, stat.ML · Submitted 2026-02-02 · Read on arXiv

cs.LG, stat.ML

Submitted: 2026-02-02

Updated: 2026-09-16

Comments: 13 pages

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: In many experimental settings, active learning can improve sample efficiency by sequentially selecting where to measure, which is particularly valuable when experiments are expensive.

Terminology

Abstract

In many experimental settings, active learning can improve sample efficiency by sequentially selecting where to measure, which is particularly valuable when experiments are expensive. Gaussian processes with variance-based acquisition criteria are widely used for this purpose, but have two limitations. First, they are observation-independent: their posterior variance depends only on where samples are acquired, not on what is measured, impairing their sensitivity to the structure of the acquired data. Second, they inflate the variance near boundaries, leading to excessive sampling at the edges of the space compared to the interior. These limitations undermine the gains in sampling efficiency expected from sequential acquisition. We address both limitations. We derive a reconstruction-driven design density and use the posterior mean to build a training-free warp that places more measurements where the target function varies rapidly. A geometric equalizer separately corrects boundary bias. Across sixteen synthetic and two real-data benchmarks, the geometric equalizer consistently improves function reconstruction by correcting boundary bias, while the reconstruction warp provides further gains by concentrating measurements where the posterior mean varies rapidly.

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