From Selection to Generation: A Survey of LLM-based Active Learning
Yu Xia, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Zhouhang Xie, Junda Wu, Xintong Li, Ryan Aponte, Hanjia Lyu, Joe Barrow
Abstract
Active Learning (AL) has been a powerful paradigm for improving model efficiency and performance by selecting the most informative data points for labeling and training. In recent active learning frameworks, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been employed not only for selection but also for generating entirely new data instances and providing more cost-effective annotations. Motivated by the increasing importance of high-quality data and efficient model training in the era of LLMs, we present a comprehensive survey on LLM-based Active Learning. We introduce an intuitive taxonomy that categorizes these techniques and discuss the transformative roles LLMs can play in the active learning loop. We further examine the impact of AL on LLM learning paradigms and its applications across various domains. Finally, we identify open challenges and propose future research directions. This survey aims to serve as an up-to-date resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to gain an intuitive understanding of LLM-based AL techniques and deploy them to new applications.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{xia-etal-2025-selection,
title = "From Selection to Generation: A Survey of {LLM}-based Active Learning",
author = "Xia, Yu and
Mukherjee, Subhojyoti and
Xie, Zhouhang and
Wu, Junda and
Li, Xintong and
Aponte, Ryan and
Lyu, Hanjia and
Barrow, Joe and
Chen, Hongjie and
Dernoncourt, Franck and
Kveton, Branislav and
Yu, Tong and
Zhang, Ruiyi and
Gu, Jiuxiang and
Ahmed, Nesreen K. and
Wang, Yu and
Chen, Xiang and
Deilamsalehy, Hanieh and
Kim, Sungchul and
Hu, Zhengmian and
Zhao, Yue and
Lipka, Nedim and
Yoon, Seunghyun and
Huang, Ting-Hao Kenneth and
Wang, Zichao and
Mathur, Puneet and
Pal, Soumyabrata and
Mukherjee, Koyel and
Zhang, Zhehao and
Park, Namyong and
Nguyen, Thien Huu and
Luo, Jiebo and
Rossi, Ryan A. and
McAuley, Julian",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.708/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.708",
pages = "14552--14569",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0"
}