Why Pool When You Can Flow? Active Learning with GFlowNets

The scalability of pool-based active learning is limited by the computational cost of evaluating large unlabeled datasets, a challenge that is particularly acute in virtual screening for drug discovery. While Active learning strategies such as Bayesian Active Learning by Disagreement (BALD) prioritize informative samples, it remains computationally intensive when scaled to libraries containing billions samples. Inthis work, we introduce BALD-GFlowNet, a generative active learning framework that circumvents this issue. Our method leveragesGenerative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) to directly sample objects in proportion to the BALD reward. By replacing traditional pool-basedacquisition with generative sampling, BALD-GFlowNet achieves scalability that is independent of the size of the unlabeled pool. In our virtual screening experiment, we show that BALD-GFlowNet achieves a performance comparable to that of standard BALD baseline while generating more structurally diverse molecules, offering apromising direction for efficient and scalable molecular discovery.