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Featured Application: The present study can provide an efficient sampling method for candidate points in the iteration process of active learning reliability analysis. In active learning reliability methods, an approximation of limit state function (LSF) with high precision is the key to accurately calculating the failure probability (Pf). However, existing sampling methods cannot guarantee that candidate samples can approach the LSF actively, which lowers the accuracy and stability of the results and causes excess computational effort. In this paper, a novel candidate samples-generating algorithm was proposed, by which a group of evenly distributed candidate points on the predicted LSF of performance function (either the real one or the surrogate model) could be obtained. In the proposed method, determination of LSF is considered as an optimization problem in which the absolute value of performance function was considered as objective function. After this, a normal search particle swarm optimization (NSPSO) was designed to deal with such problems, which consists of a normal search pattern and a multi-strategy framework that ensures the uniform distribution and diversity of the solution that intends to cover the optimal region. Four explicit performance functions and two engineering cases were employed to verify the effectiveness and accuracy of NSPSO sampling method. Four state-of-the-art multi-modal optimization algorithms were used as competitive methods. Analysis results show that the proposed method outperformed all competitive methods and can provide candidate samples that evenly distributed on the LSF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]