Active Feature Acquisition

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Overview

Active Feature Acquisition (AFA) studies how a model should choose which features, measurements, or questions to obtain when each has a cost and only partial information is initially available. Common approaches use information gain or uncertainty estimates, reinforcement learning and Bellman planning for sequential decisions, and differentiable relaxations that make discrete acquisition policies easier to train; bandit methods address online settings with global budgets. Applications include clinical diagnosis, longitudinal health measurement, image sensing, and cost-sensitive tabular prediction, where useful features may depend on earlier observations. A central tension is whether planning several acquisitions ahead beats simpler greedy policies: benefits vary by dataset and budget, while missing training data, policy complexity, and the balance between predictive accuracy and acquisition cost remain important challenges.

Latest papers

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19 papers6 papers in the last four weeks, level with the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. The Lagrangian Structure of Cost-Penalized Active Feature Acquisition

    Oct 15, 2026Joseph BinghamActive Feature AcquisitionConstrained Optimization

    Faculty of Computer Science Faculty of Biology Technion – Israel Institute of Technology Haifa 3200003, Israel

  2. Robust Explanatory Analysis for Structured Optimization Networks (REASON) in Learning

    Oct 14, 2026Vahid Jebraeeli, Hamid Krim, Keisuke FujiiInference-Time OptimizationNeural Network Robustness

    ECE Department, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA · Graduate School of Informatics, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan

  3. JevForest: Path Voting for Budgeted Feature Acquisition

    Oct 7, 2026Yu YanActive Feature AcquisitionRandom Forest

    University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

  4. AFA-BANDIT: Provably Near-Optimal Online Multi-Feature Classification Under Budget Constraints

    Oct 6, 2026AbdAlRahman Odeh, Teng-Hui Huang, Hesham El GamalActive LearningActive Feature Acquisition

    The University of Sydney School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Sydney 2006, NSW, Australia · The University of Sydney Faculty of Engineering Sydney 2006, NSW, Australia

  5. Active Feature Acquisition for Cost-Efficient Temporal Prediction with Reduced Participant Burden

    Oct 5, 2026Yunni Qu, Bing Cai Kok, Whitney Ringwald +4Time Series ForecastingActive Learning

    Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill · Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill · School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore +2

  6. Evaluation of Active Feature Acquisition Policies with Tabular Foundation Models

    Oct 5, 2026Yuta Kobayashi, Divyam Madaan, Shalmali JoshiOff-Policy EvaluationValue Function Estimation

    Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University

  7. Active Feature Acquisition With Incomplete Training Data

    Sep 26, 2026Reza Rezvan, Valter Schütz, Han Wu +2Active Feature AcquisitionLearning with Missing Data

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering Chalmers University of Technology & University of Gothenburg

  8. When Does Synergy Help Active Feature Acquisition? A PID-Based Study

    Sep 26, 2026Jie Li, Maruf A. Dhali, Hjalmar R. BoumaActive Feature AcquisitionFeature Interaction Modeling

    Acutelines Data Science Group University Medical Center Groningen University of Groningen Groningen, The Netherlands · Department of Artificial Intelligence University of Groningen Groningen, The Netherlands

  9. Active Data Acquisition with Side Information via Discrete Diffusion Priors

    Sep 26, 2026An Vuong, Thinh NguyenActive Feature AcquisitionActive Learning

    Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Oregon State University Corvallis, OR 97331, USA.

  10. HPOQuest: A Rare-Disease Diagnostic Agent Using Active Phenotype Acquisition

    Sep 16, 2026Kamilia Zaripova, Nassir Navab, Azade Farshad +1Rare Disease DiagnosisClinical Decision Support

    Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany · Computational Health Center, Helmholtz Center Munich, Oberschleißheim, Germany · Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), Munich, Germany +2

  11. Learning Source Acquisition Policies by Offline Planning

    Sep 13, 2026Ziqi Zhao, Run Xu, Qingjian NiActive Feature AcquisitionPolicy Learning

    School of Computer Science and Engineering Southeast University Nanjing, China

  12. Explanations-Driven Active Feature Acquisition for Algorithmic Recourse

    Sep 10, 2026Vinura Galwaduge, Jagath SamarabanduCounterfactual ExplanationsCost-Aware Inference

    Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering Western University London, ON, Canada

  13. BRiG-AFA: Bellman Risk-to-Go Learning for Non-Myopic Active Feature Acquisition

    Aug 3, 2026Jiaorong Feng, Qian Li, Ying LiCost-Aware InferenceActive Learning

    Curtin Business School, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia, Australia · †Present affiliation: Independent Researcher. · School of Electrical Engineering, Computing and Mathematical Sciences, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia, Australia

  14. Zero-Shot Active Feature Acquisition via LLM-Elicitation

    Jun 17, 2026Binyamin Perets, Natalie Mendelson, Shiran Vainberg +3Zero-Shot LearningMarkov Random Fields

    Faculty of Medicine, Technion. · NVIDIA

  15. Order-Agnostic Autoregressive Modelling with Missing Data

    May 7, 2026Ignacio Peis, Pablo M. Olmos, Jes FrellsenIncomplete Data ImputationLearning with Missing Data

    Technical University of Denmark & Pioneer Centre for AI · Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

  16. Non-Myopic Active Feature Acquisition via Pathwise Policy Gradients

    May 6, 2026Linus Aronsson, Morteza Haghir ChehreghaniPolicy GradientActive Learning

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering · Chalmers University of Technology & University of Gothenburg · Gothenburg, Sweden

  17. ActFER: Agentic Facial Expression Recognition via Active Tool-Augmented Visual Reasoning

    Apr 10, 2026Shifeng Liu, Zhengye Zhang, Sirui Zhao +7Facial Expression RecognitionAffective Computing

    State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Intelligence, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China · Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China +2

  18. Sampling-guided exploration of active feature selection policies

    Mar 16, 2026Gabriel Bernardino, Anders Jonsson, Patrick Clarysse +1Active Feature AcquisitionFeature Selection

    Department of Engineering, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain · Univ Lyon, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, INSA-Lyon, CNRS, Inserm, CREATIS UMR 5220, U1294, F-69621, Lyon, France · Institut Universitaire de France (IUF)

  19. Relaxed Efficient Acquisition of Context and Temporal Features

    Mar 11, 2026Yunni Qu, Dzung Dinh, Grant King +5Active Feature AcquisitionFeature Selection

    The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill · University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA · University of Michigan +3