ConceptioArchivearXiv CS
arXiv CSopen access

Robust Bayesian Decision Making under Adversarial Uncertainty

Unknown · 2026 · arxiv_cs
arXiv CS · Papers · License: Open Access · 2026
Open Source ↗Direct PDF ↓
machine learning, deep learning, neural networks

Robust Bayesian Decision Making under Adversarial Uncertainty

Haripriya Harikumar1 1

Sammie Katt2,3

Yasir Zubayr Barlas1

Samuel Kaski1,2,3

Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, UK 2 ELLIS Institute Finland 3 Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

Abstract

arXiv:2607.08590v1 [cs.LG] 9 Jul 2026

Scientific experiments are often designed to maximize information gain, yet in many applications the primary objective is to support reliable downstream decision-making. Existing decision-aware experimental design and active learning methods typically assume well-specified outcome models and implicitly rely on the stability of the optimal decision under real-world perturbations. In practice, however, experimental outcomes are frequently influenced by hidden or weakly modeled effects, which can substantially alter decision optimality and lead to misleading conclusions. We study sequential adversarially robust decision-aware experimental design, where data acquisition has to take into account information gain against plausible worst-case unexpected effects, modeled here as variation in adversarial variables. Building on Bayesian decision theory, we formalize an adversarially robust optimal decision under this setting and derive a principled Bayesian experimental design criterion. The criterion explicitly targets decision stability rather than nominal optimality. Experiments on synthetic and real-world scientific datasets show that conventional decision-aware design can converge rapidly to high confidence yet fragile decisions, while our robustness-aware approach yields decisions that are significantly more stable and reliable under adversarial variation.

1

INTRODUCTION

Science advances through controlled experimentation [Fisher, 1935, Cheng and Shen, 2005, Melendez et al., 2021]: experiments are designed by manipulating a set of controllable variables, observing outcomes, and drawing conclusions about an underlying process. Classical exper-

Figure 1: Three treatment plans (in green, orange, and blue curves) and their corresponding outcomes on the y-axis. A clinician must select a treatment for a new patient (indicated by the black dashed line). The x-axis denotes adversarially perturbed variable associated with patients. Although the blue treatment appears optimal (highest outcome) for the new patient, the smoother nominal utility (green) leads to decisions that remain stable across the perturbation region (shaded grey area denoted as xa − ϵ and xa + ϵ ), motivating adversarially robustness-aware decision learning.

imental design [Chaloner and Verdinelli, 1995, Ryan and Morgan, 2007] methods aim to test hypotheses or maximize information gain. In practice, however, experimentation is costly, resources are limited, and not all relevant variables can be identified, measured, or controlled. As a result, experimental outcomes are often influenced by weakly modeled adversarial factors that distort outcomes and degrade the reliability of downstream decisions [Corbett-Davies et al., 2017, Lacoste-Julien et al., 2011]. This challenge is particularly significant in high-dimensional settings, where some potential adversarial variables may systematically affect outcomes in ways that are difficult to model probabilistically. Such factors may be external, latent, partially observable, or implicitly coupled to the experimental process [Grünwald and van Ommen, 2017, Rainforth et al., 2024], and their influence often becomes apparent only after decisions are made. Consequently, experimental designs that are op-

timal for parameter inference or predictive accuracy can lead to fragile or misleading decision-making when these influences are present. This raises a fundamental question: how can experiments be designed to support decisions that remain reliable under variations in adversarial variables?

2

BACKGROUND

2.1

BAYESIAN OPTIMAL EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN

The same abstract problem occurs in decision-making in personalized medicine, for instance, when a new patient arrives, the doctor must decide on the most appropriate treatment strategy. However, the doctor does not know beforehand, how a particular patient responds to a particular treatment. An interesting example of experimental design to gather indirect evidence is from active learning for personalized medicine [Bica et al., 2021, Sundin et al., 2019]. The algorithm serves as an information acquisition policy that assists the doctor in determining which additional patient data from an existing unlabeled patient set (outcome of the treatment is not known) would be the most informative to improve treatment decisions. Once the doctor or medical system retrieves the corresponding medical outcome (e.g. contact the physician who are treating them), the algorithm updates its predictive model of the response to treatment. The final decision lies with the physician, who integrates algorithmic recommendations with clinical expertise, ethical considerations, and patient specific constraints. However, while such decisions based on active learning may be optimal under nominal conditions, they can lack robustness to unexpected variations during treatment. This becomes particularly important in the presence of adversarial variables - factors that can significantly influence outcomes if not properly modeled. Therefore, a truly robust and reliable treatment decision must explicitly consider variations against the plausible worst-case unexpected effects in these adversarial variables to ensure stability in medical outcomes (shown in Fig. 1).

Bayesian optimal experimental design (BOED) [Lindley, 1956, Rainforth et al., 2024] is a framework for selecting optimal designs ξ ∈ Ξ to acquire data y to obtain information about a parameter of interest θ. This is done by selecting designs that maximize the expected reduction in entropy from the prior p(θ) to the posterior p(θ | ξ, y). In other words, we maximize the expected information gain (EIG)

Motivated by this, we view scientific experimentation as a process that must account for uncertainty not only in model parameters, but also in the stability of decisions under adversarial variable variation. Rather than focusing solely on identifying parameters or predictions that are optimal under nominal assumptions, we argue that experimental design should explicitly target robust decision quality, that is, decisions whose optimality persists under plausible worstcase effects of unmodeled factors [Krause et al., 2007]. Building on Bayesian decision theory Berger [2013], we develop an adversarially robust, decision-aware experimental design framework that explicitly optimizes data acquisition for downstream decision reliability. Our approach differs from standard Bayesian optimal experimental design by shifting the focus from parameter inference to adversarially robust decision utility, thereby aligning experimental design with the ultimate goal of making stable and reliable decisions in complex, real-world systems.

EIG(ξ) = E [H[p(θ)] − H[p(θ | ξ, y)]],

(1)

p(y|ξ)

where H[·] denotes the Shannon entropy [Shannon, 1948], H[p(·)] = − Ep(·) [log p(·)]. The optimal design is ξ ∗ = argmaxξ∈Ξ EIG(ξ). As proposed by Houlsby et al. [2011], Eq. (1) can re-written in the form of entropies on the outcome space y as follows EIG(ξ) =

E [H[p(y | ξ)] − H[p(y | ξ, θ)]],

(2)

p(θ|D)

where D = {(ξi , yi )}1:N contains the N designobservation pairs obtained thus far.

2.2

BAYESIAN DECISION THEORY

Bayesian decision theory [Berger, 2013] is effective for decision-making under uncertainty. It has a decision utility function denoted as U (θ, d), where θ is the state of the system when making a decision d ∈ S. This utility function quantifies the usefulness of taking the decision d ∈ S when the system is in state θ. The optimal decision is obtained by maximizing the expected utility d∗ = argmaxd∈S

E [U (θ, d)].

(3)

p(θ|D)

In many applications, decisions influence downstream outcomes y, making it more natural to define utility over y than θ [Kuśmierczyk et al., 2019, Vadera et al., 2021]. In such cases, we write the utility as U (yΞ , d) defined over all possible predicted outcomes yΞ when making a decision d ∈ S. As a result, the optimal decision can be expressed in terms of the predicted outcomes by d∗ = argmaxd∈S

E

[U (yΞ , d)],

(4)

p(yΞ |D)

where p(yΞ | D) = {p(y | ξ, D)}ξ∈Ξ , a joint predictive distribution of outcomes over all possible designs given the current information in D and p(y | ξ, D) = Ep(θ|D) [p(y | ξ, θ, D)] is the predictive distribution [Huang et al., 2024].

2.3

BAYESIAN ACTIVE LEARNING

In a resource-constrained setup, active learning [McCallum and Nigam, 1998, Dasgupta, 2004, Golovin and Krause, 2011, Settles, 2012] looks for samples that help the decision making process with minimal sampling. These samples are an unlabeled pool of data and the decision-maker would observe the label that would eventually help them make an optimal decision. Consider a training dataset D = {(ξi , di , yi )}1:N and an unlabeled query pool Dq = {(ξi , di )}1:N . Starting from the EIG in Eq. (2), one queries from Dq by PEIG(ξ ∗ , d∗ ) = argmax(ξj ,dj )∈Dq (H[p(yj | (ξj , dj ), D)] −Ep(θ|D) [H[p(yj | (ξj , dj ), θ)]]). (5) Eq. (5) can be further refined by considering a new design ˜ for which the decision-maker must make a decision by ξ, querying the unlabeled query pool, as follows, ˜ D)] TEIG(ξ ∗ , d∗ ) = argmax(ξj ,dj )∈Dq (H[p(ỹ | ξ, ˜ D ∪ {(ξj , dj , yj )})]]). −Ep(yj |(ξj ,dj ),D) [H[p(ỹ | ξ,

(6)

Here, ξj is from the query pool Dq , and yj is computed from the predictive model trained with D. Filstroff et al. [2024] characterize the optimal decision into ˜ defined a quantity of interest, which is denoted as Dbest (ξ), as a discrete random variable with probability mass function |S| {πd }d=1 , where πd is the posterior probability that d is the ˜ We define a utility optimal decision for a new design ξ. function Ud (ξ, d) → R, or simply Ud (ξ) → R, which quantifies the quality of taking a decision d when the design is ξ. So, πd for ξ˜ can be defined as follows, πd = P(d = argmaxd′ ∈S Ud′ (ξ˜j , d′ )).

(7)

˜ Eq. (6) can be refined by including So, for a new design ξ, the new quantity of interest, i.e., the posterior distribution ˜ is taken into account, of decision uncertainty Dbest (ξ) ˜ | D)] DEIG(ξ ∗ , d∗ ) = argmax(ξj ,dj )∈Dq (H[p(Dbest (ξ) ˜ | D ∪ {(ξj , dj , yj )})]]). −Eyj ∼p(yj |(ξj ,dj ),D) [H[p(Dbest (ξ) (8)

3

ADVERSARIALLY ROBUST BAYESIAN DECISION MAKING

While downstream decision-making is the ultimate objective, it is crucial to account for adversarial variables that may undermine these decisions if we optimize solely for immediate performance. Such variables can have long-term detrimental effects, causing decisions that appear optimal in the short-term to fail under future conditions. Therefore, it is essential to model and anticipate changes in these variables, aiming for decisions that are both robust and optimal.

For simplicity, we assume that the decision-maker is able to identify these variables, for example a clinician defining realistic variation in cholesterol readings. This is practically relevant because domain experts are part of the process. So our proposed method remains agnostic to how these variables are identified and can be combined with sensitivity analysis, domain-driven feature selection, or data-driven instability detection. Consider nominal design variables as ξt and adversarial design variables as ξa (both vectors) and denoted as ξ = (ξt , ξa ). The downstream decision space is denoted as S. The outcomes observed after taking a decision d ∈ S is represented as yi ∈ Y. The dataset D = {((ξt , ξa )i , di , yi )}1:N contains the design variables, adversarial design variables, the decision, and the outcome of the decision. Our main objective is to query a design from the query pool that will help us make an adversarially robust decision for a new design. For each decision d ∈ S, we define the latent utility function Ud (ξt , ξa ) → R, which quantifies the quality of taking a decision d when the design is (ξt , ξa ). Throughout this work, we set Ud = yd , which is the outcome we estimate from the predictive model for a decision d. For adversarial robustness, in this paper we consider the case where we want to build robustness to adversarial perturbations for the adversarial variable ξa up to a user-specified level epsilon (ϵ) as follows, Aϵ (ξa ) = {ξa′ : ∥ξa′ − ξa ∥ ≤ ϵ}, where the value of ϵ controls the scope of the adversarial perturbation. This has a natural game-theoretic interpretation. Specifically, the decision-making problem can be viewed as a two-player Stackelberg game [Von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1947, Grünwald and Dawid, 2004] in which the decision-maker first selects a decision d ∈ S, and an adversary subsequently chooses a perturbation ξa′ ∈ Aϵ (ξa ) to minimize the resulting utility. In scientific settings we do not necessarily assume that the perturbation is adversarial, but this is a technical way of deriving worst-case guarantees. Under this perspective, the objective is to select the decision that maximizes the worst-case latent utility, d∗ (ξt , ξa ; ϵ) = arg max ′ min

d∈S ξa ∈Aϵ (ξa )

Ud (ξt , ξa′ ).

Our formulation is closely related to the targeted active learning framework of Filstroff et al. [2024], which connects utility modeling with downstream decision-making. We redefine the target of information as a robust decision random variable. Adapting this perspective to an adversarial setting, we define the robust value of each decision as the worst-case latent utility over the admissible perturbation set: Vd (ξt , ξa ; ϵ) = ′ min

ξa ∈Aϵ (ξa )

Ud (ξt , ξa′ ).

(9)

The robust-optimal decision is therefore given by, d∗ (ξt , ξa ; ϵ) = arg max Vd (ξt , ξa ; ϵ). d∈S

(10)

Proposition 1. Assume that the latent utility Ud (ξt , ξa′ ) is well-defined for ξa′ ∈ Aϵ (ξa ). Then, for every decision d ∈ S, Vd (ξt , ξa ; ϵ) ≤ Ud (ξt , ξa′ ), and consequently, maxd∈S Vd (ξt , ξa ; ϵ) ≤ maxd∈S Ud (ξt , ξa′ ). Proof. Since ξa′ ∈ A(ξa ), the nominal utility Ud (ξt , ξa′ ) is one of the candidates in the minimization defining Vd (ξt , ξa ; ϵ). Therefore Vd (ξt , ξa ; ϵ) ≤ Ud (ξt , ξa′ ). Taking the maximum over d ∈ S on both sides gives maxd∈S Vd (ξt , ξa ; ϵ) ≤ maxd∈S Ud (ξt , ξa′ ). Proposition 1 formalizes the cost of adversarial robustness in decision making, meaning optimizing decisions for worstcase perturbations cannot give higher utility than the nominal optimum. Proposition 2. Let 0 ≤ ϵ1 ≤ ϵ2 , and let the corresponding adversarial perturbation sets be Aϵ1 (ξa ) ⊆ Aϵ2 (ξa ). Then, for every decision d ∈ S, the robust utility is non-increasing with respect to the adversarial radius ϵ. Proof. Since ϵ1 ≤ ϵ2 , we have Aϵ1 (ξa ) ⊆ Aϵ2 (ξa ). Hence, Vd (ξt , ξa ; ϵ2 ) = ′ min

Ud (ξt , ξa′ )

≤ ′ min

Ud (ξt , ξa′ )

ξa ∈Aϵ2 (ξa ) ξa ∈Aϵ1 (ξa )

AR-DEIG(ξ ∗ , d∗ ) = arg

max (ξj ,dj )∈Dq

rob ˜ (H[p(Dbest (ξ; ϵ) | D)]

rob ˜ −Eyj ∼p(yj |(ξj ,dj ),D) [H[p(Dbest (ξ; ϵ) | D ∪ {(ξj , dj , yj )})]]). (12)

Lemma 3.1. As ϵ → 0, the AR-DEIG in Eq. (12) becomes equivalent to the D-EIG in Eq. (8). Proof. The value of ξa′ lies within Aϵ (ξa ). As ϵ → 0, Aϵ (ξa ) = [ξa , ξa ] = {ξa }. This collapses Eq. (12) to minimize over {ξa }. Eq. (11) proves to be the same as Eq. (7) and Eq. (12) becomes Eq. (8).

4

EXPERIMENTS

We compare our proposed method, denoted as AR-DEIG (ours), against five active learning baselines, specifically: 1. Random Sampling (RS): query points are drawn uniformly at random from the input space. 2. Uncertainty Sampling (US): query points are selected by maximizing the posterior predictive variance.

= Vd (ξt , ξa ; ϵ1 ).

Taking the maximum over d ∈ S preserves the inequality.

Proposition 2 formalizes that increasing the adversarial budget can only make decisions more conservative: as the perturbation set expands, the worst-case utility cannot improve. Consequently, designing experiments within underestimated perturbation levels may produce decisions that appear safer than they truly are. We quantify the uncertainty through the posterior probability of robust optimality for a new design ξ˜ = (ξ˜t , ξ˜a ),   πdrob = P d = d∗ (ξ˜t , ξ˜a ; ϵ) | D , (11) which measures how likely each decision is to remain optimal under worst-case adversarial perturbations induced rob ˜ by ϵ. We define Dbest (ξ; ϵ) as a discrete random variable |S| with probability mass function {πdrob }d=1 , where πdrob is the posterior probability that d is the robust optimal decision for a new design ξ˜ under ϵ. To reduce uncertainty in the posterior distribution rob ˜ Dbest (ξ; ϵ), we adopt an information-theoretic query strategy based on the EIG criterion in Eq. (8). Specifically, given the current unlabeled query pool Dq = (ξj , dj ), we define the proposed Adversarially Robust Decision Expected Information Gain (AR-DEIG) for a new design ξ˜ as

3. Standard Expected Information Gain (PEIG) [Houlsby et al., 2011]: query points are chosen to maximize the expected information gain about the predictive outcome. 4. Targeted Expected Information Gain (TEIG): query points are selected to maximize the expected information gain about a specific target point. 5. Decision-based Expected Information Gain (DEIG) [Filstroff et al., 2024]: query points are chosen to minimize the entropy of the optimal decision. To approximate the expectation in Eq. (12), we use the Monte Carlo [James, 1980] and Gaussian-Hermite quadrature [Liu and Pierce, 1994] approximation schemes discussed in Section A. The code of our proposed method is available at https://github.com/haripriyaaharikumar/ARDEIG. 4.1 4.1.1

EVALUATION METRICS Adversarial Robustness Evaluation

Mean over perturbations We generated N adversarial perturbations for each of the M test instances by systematically varying inputs along adversarial directions. Each perturbed sample was evaluated using the decision function associated with its original test instance. Performance was then aggregated by averaging outcomes across all N adversarial samples at each acquisition step.

Figure 2: Adversarial Robustness Evaluation: AR-DEIG achieves the strongest robustness across acquisition steps, outperforming baselines in both average and tail-risk metrics. This is reflected by the green curves attaining higher values in the mean panel and less negative values in the worst-case and CVaR10 panels across the acquisition steps. Metrics are computed over 5,000 adversarial samples with perturbation budget ϵ = 0.3. The x-axis shows the number of acquisitions; mean (left), worst-case (middle), and CVaR10 (right). Worst case For each test instance, the minimum (worstcase) outcome was identified across its N adversarial perturbations. These per-instance worst-case values were then aggregated over all test data, and the mean and standard error were computed at each acquisition step. CVaR bottom 10 percentile For each test instance, N adversarial perturbations were generated, and the outcomes in the lowest 10th percentile were selected. These tail outcomes were then aggregated across all test data, and the mean and standard error were computed at each step. 4.1.2

Nominal Evaluation

This is applicable when ground-truth decisions are available. Accuracy For each of the M test instances, a binary accuracy indicator is defined, taking the value 1 when the predicted decision matches with the ground-truth decision, and 0 otherwise. Entropy of the posterior We compute the entropy of the posterior decision for each of the N test data at each acquisition step. 4.2 4.2.1

SYNTHETIC 1-D REGRESSION Data generation

We generated 1-dimensional synthetic data with 100 training data, 299 data in the query pool, and 500 test data with three decision options. To mimic real-world decision-making scenarios where some outcomes are smooth while others exhibit irregular or rapidly varying behavior, we construct a synthetic dataset with heterogeneous smoothness across decision outcomes. The covariates x are sampled from a standard normal distribution. We generate three different outcomes (decisions) as independent realizations of Gaussian Process (GPs). We set one decision outcome to be smoother

than the rest (an example is shown in Fig. 10 as blue (smooth), orange, and green curves). To be more specific, we use Matérn Kernel for this dataset. For the smooth decision d = 0, we set ℓsmooth = 0.6 and νsmooth = 5/2 while for the remaining decisions (d = 1, 2) we fix ℓrough = 0.18 and νrough = 1/2.

4.2.2

Adversarial Robustness Evaluation

We evaluated the reliability of the decisions for 500 test data by measuring the proportion of correct outcomes in 5000 adversarial samples. Specifically, adversarial samples were generated such that they fulfill the assumptions in Section 3. We report the mean, worst-case, and CVaR10 (bottom 10%) (metrics defined in Section 4.1.1) performance for these adversarial samples with respect to the acquisition steps, in Fig. 2 and Fig. 3 with ϵ values as 0.3 and 0.5 (ϵ values 0.1 and 0.7 is in Section C.2.1). Across both perturbation levels (0.3 and 0.5), AR-DEIG consistently achieves the strongest robustness, outperforming all five baseline methods in both average and tail-risk metrics. The gains are more pronounced under stronger perturbations i.e for ϵ = 0.3, with clear improvements in worst-case and CVaR10 performance. In contrast, D-EIG exhibits a collapse (Fig. 2), which can be attributed to overfitting to nominally optimal decisions that are not robust under adversarial perturbations (see Fig. 19-28 in Section C.4).

Adaptive ϵ for dynamic perturbations We have evaluated cross-robustness ϵ analysis decoupling acquisition ϵ and evaluation budgets (ϵeval ) for AR-DEIG as shown in Fig. 4 . AR-DEIG uses ϵ ∈ {0.1, 0.3, 0.5, 0.7} and is evaluated at fixed ϵeval ∈ {0.1, 0.3}. Smaller ϵ performs best under mild shifts, while intermediate values, especially 0.3 and 0.5, perform better at ϵeval = 0.3.

Figure 3: Adversarial Robustness Evaluation: AR-DEIG maintains superior robustness under stronger perturbations, with a larger gap over baselines, particularly in worst-case and CVaR10 metrics. This is evident as the green curves remain consistently higher (or less negative) than others across all panels as acquisitions increase. Metrics are computed over 5,000 adversarial samples with perturbation budget ϵ = 0.5. The x-axis shows the number of acquisitions; mean (left), worst-case (middle), and CVaR10 (right).

(a) ϵeval = 0.1

(b) ϵeval = 0.3

Figure 4: Cross-ϵ robustness evaluation (ϵeval vs. ϵ) for AR-DEIG. We vary the AR-DEIG acquisition budget ϵ ∈ {0.1, 0.3, 0.5, 0.7} and evaluate the selected decisions under fixed evaluation budgets: ϵeval = 0.1 (left) and ϵeval = 0.3 (right). The x-axis shows the number of acquisitions Vs mean (left), worst-case (middle), and CVaR10 (right) in (a) and (b). Smaller ϵ performs best under mild evaluation shifts, while intermediate ϵ values are stronger under larger evaluation shifts.

ϵ = 0.3

ϵ = 0.5 (a) Accuracy

ϵ = 0.3

ϵ = 0.5 (b) Entropy

Figure 5: Nominal Evaluation: DEIG achieves the best performance, attaining higher accuracy and significantly lower predictive entropy across acquisition steps, while AR-DEIG remains competitive. This is evident as the pink curves dominate in the accuracy panels (left) and consistently achieve the lowest values in the entropy panels (right), with the green curves (AR-DEIG) generally tracking closely behind leading methods. Results are computed on 500 test points without adversarial perturbations, with acquisition performed under budgets ϵ = 0.3 and ϵ = 0.5 for AR-DEIG. The x-axis denotes the number of acquisitions; panels show accuracy (a) and entropy (b), each comparing the two perturbation levels.

4.3 4.3.1

(a) ϵ = 0.3

(b) ϵ = 0.5

Figure 6: Decision flips over acquisitions: Higher flip rates indicate frequent reassignment of test instances to different decision curves, reflecting instability and correlating with degraded adversarial performance.

4.2.3

Nominal Evaluation

We evaluate accuracy and entropy on 500 test points under nominal (non-adversarial) conditions, as defined in Section 4.1.2. Fig. 5a and Fig. 5b show accuracy and entropy with respect to the number of acquisitions for ϵ 0.3 and 0.5, with additional results for ϵ that is 0.1 and 0.7 are provided in Section C.2.2. DEIG achieves the best performance, attaining higher accuracy and lower predictive entropy across acquisition steps, while AR-DEIG remains competitive.This is expected, as nominal settings favor optimal solutions over robustness to perturbations.

4.2.4

Decision Flip Rate

To better understand the degradation in worst-case performance, we analyze the stability of the learned decision along the acquisition trajectory for each test data. Specifically, we measure the decision flip rate, defined as the fraction of test contexts whose selected decision changes between consecutive acquisition steps. As shown in Fig. 6 (with ϵ values 0.3 and 0.5 - rest is in Section C.2.3) AR-DEIG consistently exhibits lower decision flip rates compared to DEIG, particularly during the early and mid stages of acquisition. In contrast, DEIG demonstrates substantially higher instability, frequently revising its preferred decision as new observations are incorporated. This instability indicates that DEIG tends to commit to decisions with narrow utility margins that are sensitive to perturbations. By explicitly accounting for adversarial variation, AR-DEIG have more stable decisions, leading to fewer reversals over the acquisition trajectory. This decision instability coincides with the observed degradation in worst-case and CVaR performance, indicating that nominal information gain may steer the learner toward decisions that appear optimal under the posterior mean but are highly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations.

DECISION-AWARE ACTIVE LEARNING Data generation

We generated a dataset of comprising 100 training data, 299 data in query pool and 201 test data of dimensions five and four decisions. The co-variates x are sampled from a standard normal distribution. We generate four different outcomes (decisions) as independent realizations of Gaussian Process with Squared Exponential (SE) kernel with variance sampled from v ∼p0.5 + 2.0 × U(0, 1)) and lengthscales sampled from l ∼ |S|(0.25+0.75U(0, 1)), where U(0, 1) denotes a uniform random variable between 0 and 1. These outcomes are then corrupted by Gaussian white noise. Finally, the decision variable associated with each data has been done to mimic the imbalance in treatment assignment. 4.3.2

Adversarial Robustness Evaluation

For each test instance, we compute an adversarially robust ground-truth decision. Specifically, we generate 5,000 adversarial samples in the neighborhood of the test point, evaluate the minimum outcome for each decision, and select the decision that maximizes this worst-case outcome. This selected decision is treated as the robust ground-truth decision and is evaluated using Section 4.1.2. We draw samples with the epsilon set as 0.1, 0.3, and 0.5. Fig. 7 and Fig. 8 illustrate the accuracy of adversarially robust decisions at acquisition step 10 across different perturbation levels (ϵ = 0.1, 0.3, 0.5). The results in Fig. 7 and Fig. 8 are shown for settings where the adversarial subspace comprises either one or three dimensions out of a total of five. 4.4

REAL WORLD: OSTEOARTHRITIS INITIATIVE (OAI) DATASET

Osteoarthritis is a degenerative joint disease with no cure, making early diagnosis and longitudinal decision-making is critical [Katz et al., 2021, Filstroff et al., 2024]. Patient follow-ups typically occur at 12, 24, 36, 48, and >48 months (five decisions). The details of this dataset is given in Section C.3. The underlying decision boundaries are often nonsmooth due to clinical thresholds, population heterogeneity, and measurement noise, making the system sensitive to small input perturbations. Adversarial robustness evaluation (Section 4.1.1) in Fig. 9 further shows that AR-DEIG achieves consistently favorable performance across acquisition steps, matching or exceeding baselines in both average and tail-risk metrics. This is reflected in less negative mean outcomes and competitiveto-better worst-case and CVaR10 values (more evaluations can be found in Fig. 17 and Fig. 18). Fig. 18 shows ARDEIG degrades at large epsilon i.e. when ϵ = 20.0. This is precisely the expected behaviour for larger ϵ values. By

(a) ϵ = 0.1

(b) ϵ = 0.3

(c) ϵ = 0.5

Figure 7: Recovery of the ground-truth robust-optimal decision versus number of acquisitions (one adversarial dimension out of five). Ground-truth decisions are computed via worst-case evaluation over adversarial perturbations. AR-DEIG consistently outperforms baseline methods across ϵ ∈ {0.1, 0.3, 0.5}, demonstrating improved identification of robust decisions.

(a) ϵ = 0.1

(b) ϵ = 0.3

(c) ϵ = 0.5

Figure 8: Recovery of the ground-truth robust-optimal decision versus number of acquisitions (three adversarial dimensions out of five). Accuracy is computed with respect to robust-optimal decisions defined via worst-case outcomes over adversarial perturbations. As the dimensionality of adversarial variation increases, AR-DEIG maintains superior performance across ϵ ∈ {0.1, 0.3, 0.5}, indicating improved scalability in identifying robust decisions. Proposition 2, increasing ϵ induces more conservative decisions; for large ϵ, the objective becomes overly pessimistic and performance degrades.

5

RELATED WORK

5.1

ACTIVE LEARNING FOR DECISION MAKING

Active learning has been extensively studied in the context of statistical efficiency and sample selection [McCallum and Nigam, 1998, Dasgupta, 2004, Golovin and Krause, 2011], and has more recently been extended to decision-centric settings. A key line of work focuses on selecting samples that directly improve downstream decisions rather than predictive accuracy. For instance, Berger [2013] proposes minimizing Type S error, i.e., the probability of inferring the incorrect sign of a treatment effect under data imbalance. Targeted active learning [Filstroff et al., 2024] introduces a decision-aware Expected Information Gain (EIG) criterion that prioritizes queries reducing uncertainty in downstream decisions. Similarly, Lacoste-Julien et al. [2011] empha-

size posterior regions that are most relevant for decisionmaking, rather than uniformly improving parameter estimation. More recently, Huang et al. [2024] propose an amortized framework that integrates decision-making objectives directly into experimental design. In a different direction, Bal et al. [2025] adopt a game-theoretic perspective to address combinatorial and high-dimensional Bayesian optimization. Variational and amortized methods [Foster et al., 2019, 2021] are promising ways to reduce computational cost. The ambiguity-set approach in Go and Isaac [2022] is also relevant; however, it would face computational challenges and require estimators in Foster et al. [2019, 2021]. Despite these advances, existing approaches primarily assume a nominal setting, where decisions are evaluated under the learned model without accounting for adversarial or worst-case perturbations. Consequently, they may select queries that are informative under the model but fail to improve decision robustness. Furthermore, most methods rely on standard EIG formulations, which either require costly retraining or focus on predictive uncertainty rather than uncertainty over optimal decisions.

Figure 9: Adversarial Robustness Evaluation: AR-DEIG achieves consistently favorable robustness across acquisition steps, exceeding baselines in both average and tail-risk metrics. This is reflected by the green curves attaining better values in the mean panel and competitive-to-better outcomes in the worst-case and CVaR10 panels. Results are computed over 5,000 adversarial samples with perturbation budget ϵ = 0.7. Panels show mean (left), worst-case (middle), and CVaR10 (right). 5.2

ADVERSARIAL ROBUSTNESS IN BAYESIAN METHODS

Robustness in Bayesian learning has been studied from multiple perspectives. Distributionally robust approaches [Kirschner et al., 2020, Husain et al., 2023] focus on uncertainty over data-generating distributions, rather than explicit worst-case perturbations. Other works, such as Gloeckler et al. [2023], develop adversarially robust posterior inference, but do not address the problem of data acquisition or experimental design. In the context of Gaussian processes, Bogunovic et al. [2018] propose adversarially robust optimization methods that seek solutions stable under input perturbations, which focus on identifying robust optima of the objective function. Existing robust Bayesian methods primarily address either inference or optimization, but not data acquisition. In particular, they do not provide mechanisms for selecting informative queries that improve robustness of downstream decisions. Moreover, robustness is typically defined at the level of function optimization, rather than at the level of decision uncertainty. As a result, there is a lack of principled acquisition strategies that explicitly target the reduction of uncertainty over robust optimal decisions. In contrast, our approach introduces an adversarially robust decision-centric acquisition function that directly quantifies information gain over the robust optimal decision. This bridges the gap between decision-aware active learning and adversarial robustness, enabling query selection that is both informative and robust to perturbations.

6

CONCLUSION

We propose an adversarially robust, decision-aware experimental design framework that explicitly targets the stability of downstream decisions under perturbations in adversarial variables. Building on Bayesian decision theory, we introduced a worst-case utility formulation and derived the

AR-DEIG acquisition criterion, which prioritizes reducing uncertainty over the robust-optimal decision rather than optimizing nominal utility alone. This shift aligns the experimental design process with the practical objective of making reliable decisions in the presence of weakly modeled effects. Empirical evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that conventional approaches often produce high-confidence yet brittle decisions. In contrast, our method yields more stable outcomes with improved worst-case and tail-risk performance. These results highlight the importance of incorporating adversarial robustness into experimental design to ensure reliable decision-making. Future work will focus on extending robustness notions, improving scalability, and strengthening theoretical guarantees.

Acknowledgements This work was supported by the UKRI Turing AI WorldLeading Researcher Fellowship [EP/W002973/1], UKRI AI Hub in Generative Models [EP/Y028805/1], and European Lighthouse of AI for Sustainability [ELIAS, 10080425]. S. Kaski was supported by the Research Council of Finland Flagship programme: Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence FCAI and decisions 358958, 359567, and 359207. H. Harikumar and S. Kaski were supported by the UKRI Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellowship (EP/W002973/1), UKRI AI Hub in Generative Models (EP/Y028805/1), and European Lighthouse of AI for Sustainability (ELIAS, 10080425). S. Katt and S. Kaski were supported by EU funding ERC ODD-ML 101201120. YZ. Barlas was supported by a departmental studentship at The University of Manchester. The authors also thank Daolang Huang for the discussions along the progress of the work and Jaeyoung Lee for the initial discussions. The authors thank all anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. The authors also acknowledge the computational resources provided by the Aalto Science-IT project.

References Melis Ilayda Bal, Pier Giuseppe Sessa, Mojmir Mutny, and Andreas Krause. Optimistic Games for Combinatorial Bayesian Optimization with Application to Protein Design. In International Conference on Learning Representations, 2025. James O Berger. Statistical Decision Theory and Bayesian Analysis. Springer Science & Business Media, 2013. Ioana Bica, Ahmed M Alaa, Craig Lambert, and Mihaela Van Der Schaar. From Real-World Patient Data to Individualized Treatment Effects Using Machine Learning: Current and Future Methods to Address Underlying Challenges. Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, 2021. Ilija Bogunovic, Jonathan Scarlett, Stefanie Jegelka, and Volkan Cevher. Adversarially Robust Optimization with Gaussian Processes. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2018. Kathryn Chaloner and Isabella Verdinelli. Bayesian Experimental Design: A Review. Statistical science, 1995. Yi Cheng and Yu Shen. Bayesian Adaptive Designs for Clinical Trials. Biometrika, 2005. Sam Corbett-Davies, Emma Pierson, Avi Feller, Sharad Goel, and Aziz Huq. Algorithmic Decision Making and the Cost of Fairness. In Proceedings of the 23rd acm sigkdd international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, 2017. Sanjoy Dasgupta. Analysis of a greedy active learning strategy. Advances in neural information processing systems, 2004. Louis Filstroff, Iiris Sundin, Petrus Mikkola, Aleksei Tiulpin, Juuso Kylmäoja, and Samuel Kaski. Targeted Active Learning for Bayesian Decision-Making. Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2024. RA Fisher. The Design of Experiments. 1935. Adam Foster, Martin Jankowiak, Elias Bingham, Paul Horsfall, Yee Whye Teh, Thomas Rainforth, and Noah Goodman. Variational Bayesian Optimal Experimental Design. Advances in neural information processing systems, 2019. Adam Foster, Desi R Ivanova, Ilyas Malik, and Tom Rainforth. Deep Adaptive Design: Amortizing Sequential Bayesian Experimental Design. In International conference on machine learning. PMLR, 2021. Manuel Gloeckler, Michael Deistler, and Jakob H Macke. Adversarial Robustness of Amortized Bayesian Inference. In International Conference on Machine Learning, 2023.

Jinwoo Go and Tobin Isaac. Robust Expected Information Gain for Optimal Bayesian Experimental Design Using Ambiguity Sets. In Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence. PMLR, 2022. Daniel Golovin and Andreas Krause. Adaptive Submodularity: Theory and Applications in Active Learning and Stochastic Optimization. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2011. Peter Grünwald and Thijs van Ommen. Inconsistency of Bayesian Inference for Misspecified Linear Models, and a Proposal for Repairing It. Bayesian Analysis, 2017. Peter D Grünwald and A Philip Dawid. Game Theory, Maximum Entropy, Minimum Discrepancy and Robust Bayesian Decision Theory. The Annals of Statistics, 2004. Neil Houlsby, Ferenc Huszár, Zoubin Ghahramani, and Máté Lengyel. Bayesian Active Learning for Classification and Preference Learning. In Proceedings of the NIPS workshop on Bayesian optimization, experimental design and bandits: Theory and applications, 2011. Daolang Huang, Yujia Guo, Luigi Acerbi, and Samuel Kaski. Amortized Bayesian Experimental Design for DecisionMaking. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2024. Hisham Husain, Vu Nguyen, and Anton van den Hengel. Distributionally Robust Bayesian Optimization with ϕdivergences. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2023. Frederick James. Monte Carlo theory and practice. Reports on progress in Physics, 1980. Jeffrey N Katz, Kaetlyn R Arant, and Richard F Loeser. Diagnosis and Treatment of Hip and Knee Osteoarthritis: A Review. JAMA, 2021. Johannes Kirschner, Ilija Bogunovic, Stefanie Jegelka, and Andreas Krause. Distributionally Robust Bayesian Optimization. In International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics. PMLR, 2020. Andreas Krause, Brendan McMahan, Carlos Guestrin, and Anupam Gupta. Selecting Observations against Adversarial Objectives. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 20, 2007. Tomasz Kuśmierczyk, Joseph Sakaya, and Arto Klami. Variational Bayesian Decision-Making for Continuous Utilities. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 32, 2019. Simon Lacoste-Julien, Ferenc Huszár, and Zoubin Ghahramani. Approximate inference for the loss-calibrated Bayesian. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 2011.

Dennis V Lindley. On a Measure of the Information Provided by an Experiment. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 1956. Qing Liu and Donald A Pierce. A Note on Gauss—Hermite Quadrature. Biometrika, 1994. Andrew McCallum and Kamal Nigam. Employing EM and Pool-Based Active Learning for Text Classification. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Machine Learning, 1998. JA Melendez, RJ Furnstahl, HW Grießhammer, JA McGovern, DR Phillips, and MT Pratola. Designing Optimal Experiments: An Application to Proton Compton Scattering. The European Physical Journal A, 2021. Tom Rainforth, Adam Foster, Desi R Ivanova, and Freddie Bickford Smith. Modern Bayesian Experimental Design. Statistical Science, 2024. Thomas P Ryan and JP Morgan. Modern Experimental Design. Journal of Statistical Theory and Practice, 2007. Burr Settles. Active Learning. Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2012. Claude Elwood Shannon. A Mathematical Theory of Communication. The Bell system technical journal, 27(3): 379–423, 1948. Iiris Sundin, Peter Schulam, Eero Siivola, Aki Vehtari, Suchi Saria, and Samuel Kaski. Active Learning for DecisionMaking from Imbalanced Observational Data. In International conference on Machine Learning, 2019. Meet P Vadera, Soumya Ghosh, Kenney Ng, and Benjamin M Marlin. Post-hoc loss-calibration for Bayesian neural networks. In Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, 2021. John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. 1947. Christopher KI Williams and Carl Edward Rasmussen. Gaussian Processes for Machine Learning, volume 2. MIT press Cambridge, MA, 2006.

Appendix A

APPROXIMATION FOR IMPLEMENTATION

A.1

EXPECTED INFORMATION GAIN (EIG)

We begin with a standard Bayesian regression model with likelihood p(y | x, θ) and prior p(θ), inducing the posterior p(θ | D). The Expected Information Gain (EIG) at a query x is defined as:  EIG(x) = H[p(θ | D)] − Ep(y|x,D) H[p(θ | D ∪ {(x, y)})]. (13) This expression can be rewritten as the mutual information between y and θ: ZZ p(y, θ | x, D) dy dθ. I(y; θ | x, D) = p(y, θ | x, D) log p(y | x, D)p(θ | x, D)

(14)

By symmetry of mutual information, we obtain:   EIG(x) = H[p(y | x, D)] − Ep(θ|D) H[p(y | x, θ)] ,

(15)

which avoids model retraining and operates in the output space. Gaussian Process Case.

For a non-parametric regression model y = f (x) + ϵ,

ϵ ∼ N (0, σ 2 ),

(16)

we obtain:   EIG(x) = H[p(y | x, D)] − Ep(f |D) H[p(y | x, f )] .

(17)

Under Gaussian Process (GP) [Williams and Rasmussen, 2006] regression, the predictive posterior is Gaussian with variance σx2 + σ 2 , yielding:  1 EIG(x) = log(σx2 + σ 2 ) − log(σ 2 ) . (18) 2 Thus, maximizing EIG reduces to selecting points with high predictive variance σx2 . A.2

GAUSS–HERMITE QUADRATURE

We consider expectations of the form Z E[f (y)] =

f (y) p(y) dy,

(19)

where y ∼ N (µ, σ 2 ). Using Gauss–Hermite quadrature Liu and Pierce [1994] of order N , this expectation can be approximated as N √  1 X E[f (y)] ≈ √ ωi f 2σxi + µ , π i=1

(20)

N where {xi }N i=1 are the roots of the Hermite polynomial HN (·), and the corresponding weights {ωi }i=1 are given by √ 2N −1 N ! π ωi = (21) 2. N 2 (HN −1 (xi ))

Remark. Gauss–Hermite quadrature provides an efficient deterministic approximation of Gaussian expectations and is commonly used as an alternative to Monte Carlo sampling when evaluating acquisition functions.

Figure 10: Three treatment plans (shown as green, orange, and blue curves) with their corresponding outcomes on the y-axis. The blue curve is smoother than the orange and green curves, reflecting differences in the underlying generation process described in Section 4.2.1. Method RS (1 dimension) US (1 dimension) PEIG (1 dimension) TEIG (1 dimension) DEIG (1 dimension) AR-DEIG (1 dimension) DEIG (20 dimensions) AR-DEIG (20 dimensions)

Acquisition time (in sec.) 0.00003 (0.000006) 0.19 (0.01) 1.68 (0.04) 93.27 (4.82) 162.97 (7.97) 271.31 (5.62) 247.25 (13.49) 584.96 (14.74)

Total time with 20 acquisitions (in sec.) 14.60 21.94 49.10 1883.97 3277.67 5441.31 4959.24 11712.33

Table 1: Runtime (in seconds) comparison of baseline methods - Random Sampling (RS), Uncertainty Sampling (US), Standard Expected Information Gain (PEIG), Targeted Expected Information Gain (TEIG), Decision-based Expected Information Gain (DEIG), and our proposed method Adversarially Robust Decision-Expected Information Gain (AR-DEIG). Acquisition time is the mean query-selection time per acquisition step, with standard deviation in bracket; total time is measured over 20 acquisitions.

B

COMPUTATIONAL TIME ANALYSIS

We added runtime measurements to quantify the computational overhead in Table 1. Acquisition time is the mean time to select one query point (standard deviation in brackets); total time is the runtime over 20 acquisition steps. Specifically, in the 1 dimension setting, AR-DEIG takes 271.31 seconds per acquisition compared with 162.97 seconds for DEIG. In the 20 dimensions setting, AR-DEIG takes 584.96 seconds per acquisition compared with 247.25 seconds for DEIG, about 2.36× slower. The results show that AR-DEIG is computationally heavier, as expected, but still feasible.

C

ADDITIONAL EXPERIMENT RESULTS

C.1

1D-REGRESSION

A sample plot illustrating three decision outcomes is shown in Fig. 10. The blue curve represents the smoother outcome, while the orange and green curves exhibit greater variability and roughness. We set one decision outcome to be smoother than the rest (an example is shown in the Fig. 10 as blue (smooth), orange, and green curves). To be more specific, we use

Matérn Kernel for this generating this dataset. For the smooth decision d = 0, we set ℓsmooth = 0.6 and νsmooth = 5/2 while for the remaining decisions (d = 1, 2) we fix ℓrough = 0.18 and νrough = 1/2.

Figure 11: ϵ = 0.5 Figure 12: Adversarial Robustness Evaluation high dimension (12 adversarial variables among total of 20 co-variates) with ϵ = 0.5: AR-DEIG maintains superior robustness compared to the baseline DEIG. This is evident as the green curves remain consistently higher than others across all panels as acquisitions increase. The x-axis shows the number of acquisitions; mean (left), worst-case (middle), and CVaR10 (right).

C.2

HIGHER DIMENSIONAL SYNTHETIC DATASET

To further assess scalability, we added a 20 dimensions experiment with 12 adversarial covariates and 3 decisions. To be more specific, we use Matérn Kernel for this dataset generation. For the smooth decision d = 0, we set ℓsmooth = 0.6 and νsmooth = 5/2 while for the remaining decisions (d = 1, 2) we fix ℓrough = 0.18 and νrough = 1/2. The results in Fig. 12 show that our proposed method AR-DEIG outperforms baseline DEIG when ϵ = 0.5. C.2.1

Adversarial Robustness Evaluation

The mean, worst-case, and CVaR10 (bottom 10%) (metrics defined in Section 4.1) performance for these adversarial samples with respect to the acquisition steps, in Fig. 13 and Fig. 14 for ϵ values 0.1 and 0.7. C.2.2

Nominal Evaluations

Accuracy and entropy are shown over the number of acquisitions for the 500 test points, illustrating how performance and uncertainty evolve as more queries are collected. Results for ϵ ∈ 0.1, 0.7 are presented in Fig. 15a–Fig. 15b.

Figure 13: Adversarial Robustness Evaluation: AR-DEIG achieves the slightly better robustness across acquisition steps, compared to baselines in both average and tail-risk metrics. This is reflected by the green curves attaining higher values in the mean panel and less negative values in the worst-case and CVaR10 panels across the acquisition steps. Metrics are computed over 5,000 adversarial samples with perturbation budget ϵ = 0.1. The x-axis shows the number of acquisitions; mean (left), worst-case (middle), and CVaR10 (right).

Figure 14: Adversarial Robustness Evaluation: AR-DEIG achieves the strongest robustness across acquisition steps, outperforming baselines in both average and tail-risk metrics. This is reflected by the green curves attaining higher values in the mean panel and less negative values in the worst-case and CVaR10 panels across the acquisition steps. Metrics are computed over 5,000 adversarial samples with perturbation budget ϵ = 0.7. The x-axis shows the number of acquisitions; mean (left), worst-case (middle), and CVaR10 (right).

ϵ = 0.1

ϵ = 0.7 (a) Accuracy

ϵ = 0.1

ϵ = 0.7 (b) Entropy

Figure 15: Nominal Evaluation: DEIG achieves the best performance, attaining higher accuracy and significantly lower predictive entropy across acquisition steps, while AR-DEIG remains competitive. This is evident as the pink curves dominate in the accuracy panels (left) and consistently achieve the lowest values in the entropy panels (right), with the green curves (AR-DEIG) generally tracking closely behind leading methods. Results are computed on 500 test points without adversarial perturbations, with acquisition performed under budgets ϵ = 0.1 and ϵ = 0.7. The x-axis denotes the number of acquisitions; panels show accuracy (a) and entropy (b), each comparing the two perturbation levels.

(a) ϵ = 0.1

(b) ϵ = 0.7

Figure 16: Decision flips over acquisitions with ϵ = 0.1, 0.7: Higher flip rates indicate frequent reassignment of test instances to different decision curves, reflecting instability and correlating with degraded adversarial performance.

ϵ = 0.5

ϵ = 0.7 (a) Accuracy

ϵ = 0.5

ϵ = 0.7 (b) Entropy

Figure 17: Nominal evaluation on the OAI dataset: (a) accuracy and (b) entropy of the posterior over decisions versus number of acquisitions (200 test points). AR-DEIG (ϵ = 0.5, 0.7) remains competitive with baselines, demonstrating that robustness-aware acquisition does not degrade real-world performance.

C.2.3

Decision Flip Rate

The decision flip rates for ϵ = 0.1 and ϵ = 0.7 are presented in Fig. 16a and Fig. 16b, respectively. AR-DEIG consistently achieves lower flip rates than DEIG, particularly during the early and intermediate stages of acquisition. In contrast, DEIG exhibits markedly higher instability, frequently altering its preferred decision as new observations are incorporated. C.3

ADDITIONAL DETAILS ON KNEE OSTEOARTHRITIS DATASET AND ANALYSIS

We utilize data from the Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI)1 , a large-scale longitudinal study of knee osteoarthritis. We restrict our analysis to symptomatic individuals, defined as subjects with a total WOMAC score greater than 9. From this population, we further select subjects exhibiting early-stage or doubtful radiographic osteoarthritis at baseline, according to the Kellgren– Lawrence (KL) grading system (typically KL grades 1–2). Disease progression is quantified using changes in joint space width (JSW), a widely used imaging biomarker for cartilage loss. Following established clinical thresholds, a decrease in JSW greater than 0.7 mm over follow-up is considered indicative of structural progression. JSW measurements are obtained from standardized knee radiographs at a fixed location (x = 0.25), thereby focusing on the medial compartment, where osteoarthritis progression is most commonly observed. All variables are defined at the knee level. The feature set extracted from the OAI dataset includes: • Age at baseline; • Sex; 1

https://nda.nih.gov/oai/

Figure 18: Adversarial Robustness Evaluation: At the higher perturbation budget ϵ = 20.0, AR-DEIG demonstrates degraded robustness across acquisition steps, underperforming relative to several baselines in both average and tail-risk metrics. This is reflected by the green curves attaining lower values in the mean panel and consistently worse outcomes in the worst-case and CVaR10 panels. Results are computed over 500 adversarial samples for 200 test data. Panels show mean (left), worst-case (middle), and CVaR10 (right). • Body mass index (BMI); • Total WOMAC score; • Knee alignment (varus, valgus, or neutral); • History of knee injury (binary indicator); • History of knee surgery (binary indicator); • Kellgren–Lawrence (KL) grade; • Joint space width (JSW) at x = 0.25. These variables capture a combination of demographic, clinical, and radiographic factors commonly associated with osteoarthritis onset and progression. C.3.1

Experiment details about Knee Osteoarthritis Dataset

We model body mass index (BMI) as an adversarial variable (total 9 variables) and apply AR-DEIG with perturbation magnitude ϵ = 0.5, 0.7, 20.0. Fig. 17 shows the accuracy and entropy of 200 test data and there is no significant difference in performance between the baseline DEIG and AR-DEIG. In terms of accuracy, AR-DEIG slightly outperforms DEIG in later stages, although differences remain within overlapping confidence regions. For entropy, both methods exhibit similar rates of uncertainty reduction, indicating comparable efficiency in information acquisition. These results demonstrate that incorporating adversarial robustness does not degrade performance, while improving stability under non-smooth decision landscapes typical of real-world deployment. Fig. 18 showcase the performance when we use a large ϵ value of 20.0. C.3.2

Outcome Model for Decision-Dependent Outcomes

The linear outcome model is used to estimate the conditional outcome E[Y | X, d] and is evaluated for all actions by explicitly enumerating d ∈ {1, . . . , K}. This enables computation of decision-specific outcomes without relying on a decision model. Given a set of evaluation points x, we compute predicted outcomes for all possible actions d ∈ {1, . . . , K} using the outcome model. This yields a matrix of potential outcomes, enabling evaluation of both observed and counterfactual decisions. To assess robustness, we generate perturbed inputs by adding bounded noise to selected covariate dimensions. For each perturbed point, we evaluate predicted outcomes across all actions using the outcome model. This provides a controlled way to study how small input perturbations affect decision-dependent outcomes. Linear Outcome Model We model the conditional mean outcome as a linear function of covariates, actions, and their interactions. Specifically, for each observation with covariates x ∈ Rp and action d ∈ {1, . . . , K}, we construct a feature

Figure 19: Decision-EIG: Acquisition step 1 (red star indicates the query point and black vertical line is the new point the decision-maker has to make a decision). vector that includes: (i) the covariates x, (ii) a one-hot encoding of the action d, and (iii) interaction terms between x and each action indicator. Let Dk = 1{d = k} denote the action indicators. This yields the following functional form: E[Y | X = x, d = k] = β ⊤ x + γk + x⊤ θk ,

(22)

where β ∈ Rp captures effects shared across actions, γk is the coefficient associated with action k (i.e., the effect of Dk ), and θk ∈ Rp captures action-specific heterogeneous effects. Let Z denote the resulting design matrix constructed from these components. Model parameters are estimated via ridgeregularized least squares: ŵ = (Z ⊤ Z + λI)−1 Z ⊤ y. (23) This specification allows the model to share statistical strength across actions while retaining flexibility to model actiondependent outcome responses. At prediction time, the model can be evaluated for any action k by constructing the corresponding feature representation, enabling computation of outcomes for all possible decisions. C.4

VISUALIZATION OF 1D DATASET QUERIES IN ACTIVE LEARNING

The figures illustrate the acquisition process and selected query points for a representative test instance, comparing the baseline DEIG method with our proposed approach, AR-DEIG. Red stars denote the query points selected during each acquisition step and the black vertical line is the point decision-maker has to make a decision. The dataset comprises three decisions, with outcomes color-coded as follows: blue for decision 1, orange for decision 2, and green for decision 3. In real-world applications, these decisions correspond to alternative treatment plans. The bar chart at the top of each plot shows the posterior probability over decisions after incorporating the selected query point and updating the model. C.4.1

DEIG based Querying over Acquisition steps

Fig. 19–Fig. 28 correspond to the decision-based EIG approach. Notably, this method exhibits over-exploitation, repeatedly selecting query points near local optima while failing to adequately explore surrounding brittle regions. C.4.2

AR-DEIG based Querying over Acquisition steps

Fig. 29–Fig. 38 correspond to the decision-based EIG approach. Our method exhibits a more exploratory acquisition behavior, which facilitates improved identification of robust optima over successive iterations.

Figure 20: Decision-EIG: Acquisition step 2 (red star indicates the query point and black vertical line is the new point the decision-maker has to make a decision).

Figure 21: Decision-EIG: Acquisition step 3 (red star indicates the query point and black vertical line is the new point the decision-maker has to make a decision).

Figure 22: Decision-EIG: Acquisition step 4 (red star indicates the query point and black vertical line is the new point the decision-maker has to make a decision).

Figure 23: Decision-EIG: Acquisition step 5 (red star indicates the query point and black vertical line is the new point the decision-maker has to make a decision).

Figure 24: Decision-EIG: Acquisition step 6 (red star indicates the query point and black vertical line is the new point the decision-maker has to make a decision).

Figure 25: Decision-EIG: Acquisition step 7 (red star indicates the query point and black vertical line is the new point the decision-maker has to make a decision).

Figure 26: Decision-EIG: Acquisition step 8 (red star indicates the query point and black vertical line is the new point the decision-maker has to make a decision).

Figure 27: Decision-EIG: Acquisition step 9 (red star indicates the query point and black vertical line is the new point the decision-maker has to make a decision).

Figure 28: Decision-EIG: Acquisition step 10 (red star indicates the query point and black vertical line is the new point the decision-maker has to make a decision).

Figure 29: AR-DEIG: Acquisition step 1 (red star indicates the query point and black vertical line is the new point the decision-maker has to make a decision).

Figure 30: AR-DEIG: Acquisition step 2 (red star indicates the query point and black vertical line is the new point the decision-maker has to make a decision).

Figure 31: AR-DEIG: Acquisition step 3 (red star indicates the query point and black vertical line is the new point the decision-maker has to make a decision).

Figure 32: AR-DEIG: Acquisition step 4 (red star indicates the query point and black vertical line is the new point the decision-maker has to make a decision).

Figure 33: AR-DEIG: Acquisition step 5 (red star indicates the query point and black vertical line is the new point the decision-maker has to make a decision).

Figure 34: AR-DEIG: Acquisition step 6 (red star indicates the query point and black vertical line is the new point the decision-maker has to make a decision).

Figure 35: AR-DEIG: Acquisition step 7 (red star indicates the query point and black vertical line is the new point the decision-maker has to make a decision).

Figure 36: AR-DEIG: Acquisition step 8 (red star indicates the query point and black vertical line is the new point the decision-maker has to make a decision).

Figure 37: AR-DEIG: Acquisition step 9 (red star indicates the query point and black vertical line is the new point the decision-maker has to make a decision).

Figure 38: AR-DEIG: Acquisition step 10 (red star indicates the query point and black vertical line is the new point the decision-maker has to make a decision).

Record · ID 353055 · SHA-256 dd188e6e5bac9117
Retrieved via Conceptio — every document is proof-bundled with source, license, and retrieval metadata.