Sculpting Features from Noise: Reward-Guided Hierarchical Diffusion for Task-Optimal Feature Transformation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15152v1
• Date: Wed, 21 May 2025 06:18:42 GMT
• Title: Sculpting Features from Noise: Reward-Guided Hierarchical Diffusion for Task-Optimal Feature Transformation
• Authors: Nanxu Gong, Zijun Li, Sixun Dong, Haoyue Bai, Wangyang Ying, Xinyuan Wang, Yanjie Fu,
• Abstract summary: DIFFT redefines Feature Transformation as a reward-guided generative task.<n>It produces structured, discrete features, preserving intra-feature dependencies while allowing parallel inter-feature generation.<n>It consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in predictive accuracy and robustness, with significantly lower training and inference times.
• Score: 18.670626228472877
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Feature Transformation (FT) crafts new features from original ones via mathematical operations to enhance dataset expressiveness for downstream models. However, existing FT methods exhibit critical limitations: discrete search struggles with enormous combinatorial spaces, impeding practical use; and continuous search, being highly sensitive to initialization and step sizes, often becomes trapped in local optima, restricting global exploration. To overcome these limitations, DIFFT redefines FT as a reward-guided generative task. It first learns a compact and expressive latent space for feature sets using a Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE). A Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) then navigates this space to generate high-quality feature embeddings, its trajectory guided by a performance evaluator towards task-specific optima. This synthesis of global distribution learning (from LDM) and targeted optimization (reward guidance) produces potent embeddings, which a novel semi-autoregressive decoder efficiently converts into structured, discrete features, preserving intra-feature dependencies while allowing parallel inter-feature generation. Extensive experiments on 14 benchmark datasets show DIFFT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in predictive accuracy and robustness, with significantly lower training and inference times.

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