A Mechanism-Driven Theory of Phase Transitions in Active Learning
arXiv cs.CV1mo4 min read
arXiv:2607.00144v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Active learning (AL) performance is known to be budget-dependent, yet regimes are typically defined by heuristic label counts that fail to generalize across datasets or architectures. We characterize AL dynamics by reframing budget regimes as shifts in the dominant generalization mechanism. By reinterpreting PAC-style risk components as dynamic interacting terms, we prove that dominance shifts are structurally unavoidable, creating a moving bottleneck for generalization. We operationalize this using measurable proxies and a segmented regression p
