# Information Templates: A New Paradigm for Intelligent Active Feature Acquisition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18380 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18380/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [EDDI: Efficient Dynamic Discovery of High-Value Information with Partial VAE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11142/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Interpretable Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13112/) (2021)
- [Active Feature Acquisition with Generative Surrogate Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02433/) (2020)
- [Conservative Q-Improvement: Reinforcement Learning for an Interpretable Decision-Tree Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01180/) (2019)
- [Estimating Conditional Mutual Information for Dynamic Feature Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03301/) (2023)
- [Acquisition Conditioned Oracle for Nongreedy Active Feature Acquisition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13960/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Active Feature Acquisition Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11067/) (2025)
- [Stochastic Encodings for Active Feature Acquisition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01957/) (2025)
- [Mitigating Information Loss in Tree-Based Reinforcement Learning via Direct Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08761/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Learning Source Acquisition Policies by Offline Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14299/) (2026)
- [When Does Synergy Help Active Feature Acquisition? A PID-Based Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32301/) (2026)
- [Measure Less, Know More: Self-Supervised Test-Time Feature Acquisition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03454/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Active feature acquisition (AFA) is an instance-adaptive paradigm in which, at inference time, a policy sequentially chooses which features to acquire (at a cost) before predicting. Existing approaches either train reinforcement learning policies, which deal with a difficult MDP, or greedy policies that cannot account for the joint informativeness of features or require knowledge about the underlying data distribution. To overcome this, we propose Template-based AFA (TAFA), a non-greedy framework that learns a small library of feature templates -- sets of features that are jointly informative -- and uses this library of templates to guide the next feature acquisitions. Through identifying feature templates, the proposed framework not only significantly reduces the action space considered by the policy but also alleviates the need to estimate the underlying data distribution. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that TAFA outperforms the existing state-of-the-art baselines while achieving lower overall acquisition cost and computation.