Paper

{
  "raw_xml": "<entry>\n    <id>http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11370v1</id>\n    <title>Relaxed Efficient Acquisition of Context and Temporal Features</title>\n    <updated>2026-03-11T23:17:13Z</updated>\n    <link href='https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11370v1' rel='alternate' type='text/html'/>\n    <link href='https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.11370v1' rel='related' title='pdf' type='application/pdf'/>\n    <summary>In many biomedical applications, measurements are not freely available at inference time: each laboratory test, imaging modality, or assessment incurs financial cost, time burden, or patient risk. Longitudinal active feature acquisition (LAFA) seeks to optimize predictive performance under such constraints by adaptively selecting measurements over time, yet the problem remains inherently challenging due to temporally coupled decisions (missed early measurements cannot be revisited, and acquisition choices influence all downstream predictions). Moreover, real-world clinical workflows typically begin with an initial onboarding phase, during which relatively stable contextual descriptors (e.g., demographics or baseline characteristics) are collected once and subsequently condition longitudinal decision-making. Despite its practical importance, the efficient selection of onboarding context has not been studied jointly with temporally adaptive acquisition. We therefore propose REACT (Relaxed Efficient Acquisition of Context and Temporal features), an end-to-end differentiable framework that simultaneously optimizes (i) selection of onboarding contextual descriptors and (ii) adaptive feature--time acquisition plans for longitudinal measurements under cost constraints. REACT employs a Gumbel--Sigmoid relaxation with straight-through estimation to enable gradient-based optimization over discrete acquisition masks, allowing direct backpropagation from prediction loss and acquisition cost. Across real-world longitudinal health and behavioral datasets, REACT achieves improved predictive performance at lower acquisition costs compared to existing longitudinal acquisition baselines, demonstrating the benefit of modeling onboarding and temporally coupled acquisition within a unified optimization framework.</summary>\n    <category scheme='http://arxiv.org/schemas/atom' term='cs.LG'/>\n    <published>2026-03-11T23:17:13Z</published>\n    <arxiv:primary_category term='cs.LG'/>\n    <author>\n      <name>Yunni Qu</name>\n      <arxiv:affiliation>The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill</arxiv:affiliation>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Dzung Dinh</name>\n      <arxiv:affiliation>The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill</arxiv:affiliation>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Grant King</name>\n      <arxiv:affiliation>University of Michigan</arxiv:affiliation>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Whitney Ringwald</name>\n      <arxiv:affiliation>University of Minnisota Twin Cities</arxiv:affiliation>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Bing Cai Kok</name>\n      <arxiv:affiliation>The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill</arxiv:affiliation>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Kathleen Gates</name>\n      <arxiv:affiliation>The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill</arxiv:affiliation>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Aiden Wright</name>\n      <arxiv:affiliation>University of Michigan</arxiv:affiliation>\n    </author>\n    <author>\n      <name>Junier Oliva</name>\n      <arxiv:affiliation>The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill</arxiv:affiliation>\n    </author>\n  </entry>"
}