无可靠先验时也能高效发现目标,靠记忆机制实现持续改进。
Active Target Discovery under Uninformative Prior: The Power of Permanent and Transient Memory
- 借鉴神经科学设计记忆系统,结合永久与临时记忆指导探索
- 每次新观测都提升先验估计,实现稳定性能增长
- 适合数据稀缺场景,如罕见物种或新病种探测
在医疗影像、环境监测和遥感等高成本数据获取领域,受限于预算,基于已有观测战略性采样未观测区域至关重要。生成模型(如扩散模型)可利用学习到的先验知识,在部分可观测环境中实现主动目标发现:通过任务相关观测逐步优化探索策略,引导查询至有潜力区域。然而,在数据极度有限或采样成本极高的场景(如稀有物种发现、新发疾病诊断),构建强先验难以实现,现有方法表现不佳。为此,本文提出一种新方法,可在无信息先验条件下仍实现有效的主动目标发现,确保在复杂真实场景中具备鲁棒探索与适应能力。框架理论严谨,受神经科学启发,不依赖黑箱策略,具备内在可解释性,并保证每新增一次观测,先验估计均单调增强,从而提升采样精度并强化可靠性与动态适应性。跨物种分布建模与遥感等多领域实验及消融研究证实,该方法显著优于基线方案。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
In many scientific and engineering fields, where acquiring high-quality data is expensive--such as medical imaging, environmental monitoring, and remote sensing--strategic sampling of unobserved regions based on prior observations is crucial for maximizing discovery rates within a constrained budget. The rise of powerful generative models, such as diffusion models, has enabled active target discovery in partially observable environments by leveraging learned priors--probabilistic representations that capture underlying structure from data. With guidance from sequentially gathered task-specific observations, these models can progressively refine exploration and efficiently direct queries toward promising regions. However, in domains where learning a strong prior is infeasible due to extremely limited data or high sampling cost (such as rare species discovery, diagnostics for emerging diseases, etc.), these methods struggle to generalize. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel approach that enables effective active target discovery even in settings with uninformative priors, ensuring robust exploration and adaptability in complex real-world scenarios. Our framework is theoretically principled and draws inspiration from neuroscience to guide its design. Unlike black-box policies, our approach is inherently interpretable, providing clear insights into decision-making. Furthermore, it guarantees a strong, monotonic improvement in prior estimates with each new observation, leading to increasingly accurate sampling and reinforcing both reliability and adaptability in dynamic settings. Through comprehensive experiments and ablation studies across various domains, including species distribution modeling and remote sensing, we demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms baseline approaches.
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