用大模型提取关键特征关系,零样本实现高效分类决策。
Zero-Shot Active Feature Acquisition via LLM-Elicitation
- 仅让大模型输出特征间的独立偏差与共变关系,避免能力混淆。
- 在炎症性肠病患者数据上,对最难病例的排序准确率显著领先。
- 适合临床诊断中标签稀缺、个体差异大的场景,无需预先训练。
主动特征获取(AFA)通过逐次选择观测特征来完成分类或排序决策。其核心局限在于依赖大量标注数据来拟合引导获取的统计模型。大语言模型(LLM)可提供无监督领域知识,但缺乏序列规划能力。将两者功能混同会削弱可靠性。本文提出一种零样本AFA框架:通过规范化的提示,仅让LLM返回马尔可夫随机场(MRF)的充分统计量——单个特征偏差与成对共变关系。该方法应用于二分类和top-$k$识别任务。实践中,LLM仅可靠输出类间区分性统计量,而非单一类别内部特征,这导致经典AFA失效。为此引入最大熵闭包解决度量歧义问题。在炎症性肠病(IBD)患者队列上评估,该框架优于直接使用真实标签及模型自身推断信念的结果。尤其在最难患者群体中,top-$k$获取策略显著超越现有方法。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Active feature acquisition (AFA) sequentially selects which features to observe to reach a classification or ranking decision. Its central limitation is reliance on large amount of labeled data to fit probabilistic models guiding acquisition. Large language models (LLMs) supply unsupervised domain knowledge, but are poor sequential planners. Asking one to both know and decide conflates capabilities best kept separate. Here, we develop a framework for zero-shot AFA through disciplined elicitation: asking the LLM only for what it can be trusted to return, the unary deviations and pairwise co-variations that are the sufficient statistics of a Markov random field (MRF). We apply our framework to two settings: binary classification and top-$k$ identification. In practice, the LLM reliably returns only discriminative statistics, what distinguishes the classes rather than each class in isolation, which precludes classical AFA. We apply a maximum-entropy closure that resolves this gauge ambiguity. We evaluate on a cohort of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) patients, an active clinical setting where diagnostic ambiguity and patient heterogeneity obstruct stable treatment strategies. Our framework outperforms the LLM both on real labels and on its own extracted beliefs. Where it matters most, on the hardest patients, our top-$k$ acquisition policy markedly outperforms all existing methods.
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