aiqbench analysis
This research introduces Non-Myopic Pathwise Policy Gradients (NM-PPG) to optimize adaptive feature selection in active learning scenarios, addressing the high variance inherent in standard policy gradient methods. By employing a continuous relaxation with straight-through estimators and deriving specific variance bounds, the authors enable more stable end-to-end optimization of acquisition policies for costly data gathering tasks. The approach demonstrates superior performance over existing baselines on both synthetic and real-world datasets, offering a practical advance for efficient machine learning workflows.
Non-Myopic Active Feature Acquisition via Pathwise Policy Gradients
arXiv:2605.05511v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Active feature acquisition (AFA) considers prediction problems in which features are costly to obtain and the learner adaptively decides which feature values to acquire for each instance and when to stop and predict. In this paper, we introduce a continuous relaxation of the acquisition process that enables non-myopic pathwise policy gradients (NM-PPG) through the full acquisition trajectory, avoiding the high variance of standard score-function policy gradients while allowing end-to-end optimization of the acquisition policy. To better align training with deployment, we develop a straight-through rollout that follows discrete feature acquisitions in the forward pass while backpropagating through the corresponding soft relaxation. We derive an AFA-specific average-case upper bound on the variance of this gradient estimator, which characterizes instability and motivates staged temperature sharpening. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that NM-PPG yields superior performance relative to state-of-the-art AFA baselines.
Abstract:Active feature acquisition (AFA) considers prediction problems in which features are costly to obtain and the learner adaptively decides which feature values to acquire for each instance and when to stop and predict. In this paper, we introduce a continuous relaxation of the acquisition process that enables non-myopic pathwise policy gradients (NM-PPG) through the full acquisition trajectory, avoiding the high variance of standard score-function policy gradients while allowing end-to-end optimization of the acquisition policy. To better align training with deployment, we develop a straight-through rollout that follows discrete feature acquisitions in the forward pass while backpropagating through the corresponding soft relaxation. We derive an AFA-specific average-case upper bound on the variance of this gradient estimator, which characterizes instability and motivates staged temperature sharpening. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that NM-PPG yields superior performance relative to state-of-the-art AFA baselines.
Machine Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)
arXiv:2605.05511 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2605.05511v2 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.05511 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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