PiCSRL: Physics-Informed Contextual Spectral Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR

PiCSRL introduces a physics-informed spectral reinforcement learning approach that enhances adaptive sensing in high-dimensional, low-sample environments, demonstrated on cyanobacterial gene concentration estimation from hyperspectral data.

Contribution

The paper presents PiCSRL, a novel method integrating domain knowledge into RL for improved adaptive sensing and prediction in HDLSS datasets.

Findings

PiCSRL outperforms baselines in RMSE and bloom detection rate.

Physics-informed features improve generalization in semi-supervised learning.

Scales effectively to large networks with significant performance gains.

Abstract

High-dimensional low-sample-size (HDLSS) datasets constrain reliable environmental model development, where labeled data remain sparse. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based adaptive sensing methods can learn optimal sampling policies, yet their application is severely limited in HDLSS contexts. In this work, we present PiCSRL (Physics-Informed Contextual Spectral Reinforcement Learning), where embeddings are designed using domain knowledge and parsed directly into the RL state representation for improved adaptive sensing. We developed an uncertainty-aware belief model that encodes physics-informed features to improve prediction. As a representative example, we evaluated our approach for cyanobacterial gene concentration adaptive sampling task using NASA PACE hyperspectral imagery over Lake Erie. PiCSRL achieves optimal station selection (RMSE = 0.153, 98.4% bloom detection rate, outperforming random (0.296) and UCB (0.178) RMSE baselines, respectively. Our ablation experiments demonstrate that physics-informed features improve test generalization (0.52 R^2, +0.11 over raw bands) in semi-supervised learning. In addition, our scalability test shows that PiCSRL scales effectively to large networks (50 stations, >2M combinations) with significant improvements over baselines (p = 0.002). We posit PiCSRL as a sample-efficient adaptive sensing method across Earth observation domains for improved observation-to-target mapping.