Adapting Actively on the Fly: Relevance-Guided Online Meta-Learning with Latent Concepts for Geospatial Discovery
This work addresses the challenge of sparse and biased data collection in domains like environmental monitoring, offering an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of efficiently uncovering hidden targets in dynamic geospatial environments with limited data by proposing a framework that integrates active learning, online meta-learning, and concept-guided reasoning, achieving reliable target discovery in real-world PFAS contamination datasets.
In many real-world settings, such as environmental monitoring, disaster response, or public health, with costly and difficult data collection and dynamic environments, strategically sampling from unobserved regions is essential for efficiently uncovering hidden targets under tight resource constraints. Yet, sparse and biased geospatial ground truth limits the applicability of existing learning-based methods, such as reinforcement learning. To address this, we propose a unified geospatial discovery framework that integrates active learning, online meta-learning, and concept-guided reasoning. Our approach introduces two key innovations built on a shared notion of *concept relevance*, which captures how domain-specific factors influence target presence: a *concept-weighted uncertainty sampling strategy*, where uncertainty is modulated by learned relevance based on readily-available domain-specific concepts (e.g., land cover, source proximity); and a *relevance-aware meta-batch formation strategy* that promotes semantic diversity during online-meta updates, improving generalization in dynamic environments. Our experiments include testing on a real-world dataset of cancer-causing PFAS (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) contamination, showcasing our method's reliability at uncovering targets with limited data and a varying environment.