EvidenceMoE: A Physics-Guided Mixture-of-Experts with Evidential Critics for Advancing Fluorescence Light Detection and Ranging in Scattering Media

TL;DR

EvidenceMoE introduces a physics-guided mixture-of-experts framework with evidential critics to improve fluorescence LiDAR depth and lifetime estimation in scattering media, addressing complex photon signal challenges.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel physics-informed MoE model with evidential critics for enhanced FLiDAR analysis in scattering environments, integrating physics-based expert modeling and reliability assessment.

Findings

Achieved NRMSE of 0.030 for depth estimation.

Achieved NRMSE of 0.074 for fluorescence lifetime.

Demonstrated robustness on simulated tissue FLiDAR data.

Abstract

Fluorescence LiDAR (FLiDAR), a Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology employed for distance and depth estimation across medical, automotive, and other fields, encounters significant computational challenges in scattering media. The complex nature of the acquired FLiDAR signal, particularly in such environments, makes isolating photon time-of-flight (related to target depth) and intrinsic fluorescence lifetime exceptionally difficult, thus limiting the effectiveness of current analytical and computational methodologies. To overcome this limitation, we present a Physics-Guided Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework tailored for specialized modeling of diverse temporal components. In contrast to the conventional MoE approaches our expert models are informed by underlying physics, such as the radiative transport equation governing photon propagation in scattering media. Central to our approach is EvidenceMoE, which integrates Evidence-Based Dirichlet Critics (EDCs). These critic models assess the reliability of each expert's output by providing per-expert quality scores and corrective feedback. A Decider Network then leverages this information to fuse expert predictions into a robust final estimate adaptively. We validate our method using realistically simulated Fluorescence LiDAR (FLiDAR) data for non-invasive cancer cell depth detection generated from photon transport models in tissue. Our framework demonstrates strong performance, achieving a normalized root mean squared error (NRMSE) of 0.030 for depth estimation and 0.074 for fluorescence lifetime.