针对隐蔽人群招募,提出生成式前沿规划方法,提升资源分配效率。
Generative Frontier Planning for Adaptive Peer-Referral Recruitment under Covariate-Dependent Arrivals
- 用生成模型建模推荐者与被推荐者特征的依赖关系,更贴近真实社交网络
- 设计确定性递推机制,实现每轮分配的近似最优(1-1/e)
- 适合公共卫生领域需动态优化招募策略的场景
同伴推荐招募系统(如受访者驱动抽样)对研究和干预受传染病影响的隐蔽人群至关重要。为加速招募,公共卫生机构需在多轮中自适应分配有限的推荐资源,而当前决策会影响未来招募人数和特征分布。以往工作假设推荐来自同质总体且独立同分布,忽略了真实社交中基于相似性(同质性)和共享背景的推荐行为。本文提出更现实的模型:推荐能力及新招募者特征均依赖于推荐者,通过截断计数模型与条件生成模型从数据中学习。该规划问题挑战在于每个分配方案导致未来招募分布不同。为此,我们提出生成式前沿规划(GFP),以潜在特征覆盖值代理替代逐步蒙特卡洛采样;该代理设计使得下一轮期望前沿仅依赖生成模型的有限维摘要,且可离线优化,同时保证每轮目标函数具有边际递减特性。由此,确定性递推消除了采样开销,边际贪婪算法可达到(1-1/e)近似率。在基于真实受访者驱动抽样数据校准的仿真环境中,GFP在四种折扣因子下均优于随机、强化学习及独立同分布动态规划基线。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Peer-referral recruitment systems such as respondent-driven sampling are critical for studying and intervening on hidden populations affected by infectious diseases. To accelerate recruitment, public health agencies must adaptively allocate limited referral resources across multiple rounds, where current decisions shape both the number and the covariates of future recruits. Prior work makes this problem tractable by assuming that referrals are drawn i.i.d.\ from a homogeneous population, an assumption that ignores the homophily and shared context that drive real peer recruitment. We instead consider a more realistic model in which both referral capacity and the covariates of newly referred individuals are conditioned on the referrer, learned from data with a censored count model and a conditional generative model. The resulting planning problem is challenging because each candidate allocation induces a different distribution over future recruits. We propose \emph{Generative Frontier Planning} (GFP), a model-based planner that replaces per-step Monte-Carlo sampling with a deterministic backup over a latent covariate-coverage value surrogate. The surrogate is designed so that the expected value of the next frontier depends on the offspring generative model only through finite-dimensional summaries that are amortized offline, and so that the resulting per-round objective is monotone with diminishing returns. Together, these two properties make planning tractable: the deterministic backup eliminates Monte-Carlo sampling, and the diminishing-returns structure lets a marginal greedy allocation achieve a \((1-1/e)\)-approximation for the per-round problem. On a simulation environment calibrated to a real respondent-driven sampling dataset, GFP outperforms random, reinforcement-learning, and i.i.d.\ dynamic-programming baselines across four discount factors.
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