# Decision-focused Sensing and Forecasting for Adaptive and Rapid Flood Response: An Implicit Learning Approach

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.16015 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16015/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [Smart "Predict, then Optimize"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.08005/) (2017)
- [Stochastic Beams and Where to Find Them: The Gumbel-Top-k Trick for Sampling Sequences Without Replacement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.06059/) (2019)
- [Decision-Focused Learning: Foundations, State of the Art, Benchmark and Future Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13565/) (2023)
- [Implicit MLE: Backpropagating Through Discrete Exponential Family Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01798/) (2021)
- [Smart Predict-and-Optimize for Hard Combinatorial Optimization Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10092/) (2019)
- [Learning with Differentiable Perturbed Optimizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08676/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Losses and Solution Caching for Predict-and-Optimize](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.05354/) (2020)
- [Risk Bounds and Calibration for a Smart Predict-then-Optimize Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08887/) (2021)
- [Backpropagation through Combinatorial Algorithms: Identity with Projection Works](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15213/) (2022)
- [Irregular Traffic Time Series Forecasting Based on Asynchronous Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16818/) (2023)
- [Normalizing flow-based deep variational Bayesian network for seismic multi-hazards and impacts estimation from InSAR imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13805/) (2023)
- [Near-real-time Earthquake-induced Fatality Estimation using Crowdsourced Data and Large-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03755/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Timely and reliable decision-making is vital for flood emergency response, yet it remains severely hindered by limited and imprecise situational awareness due to various budget and data accessibility constraints. Traditional flood management systems often rely on in-situ sensors to calibrate remote sensing-based large-scale flood depth forecasting models, and further take flood depth estimates to optimize flood response decisions. However, these approaches often take fixed, decision task-agnostic strategies to decide where to put in-situ sensors (e.g., maximize overall information gain) and train flood forecasting models (e.g., minimize average forecasting errors), but overlook that systems with the same sensing gain and average forecasting errors may lead to distinct decisions. To address this, we introduce a novel decision-focused framework that strategically selects locations for in-situ sensor placement and optimize spatio-temporal flood forecasting models to optimize downstream flood response decision regrets. Our end-to-end pipeline integrates four components: a contextual scoring network, a differentiable sensor selection module under hard budget constraints, a spatio-temporal flood reconstruction and forecasting model, and a differentiable decision layer tailored to task-specific objectives. Central to our approach is the incorporation of Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (I-MLE) to enable gradient-based learning over discrete sensor configurations, and probabilistic decision heads to enable differentiable approximation to various constrained disaster response tasks.