AI RESEARCH

BALLAST: Bayesian Active Learning with Look-ahead Amendment for Sea-drifter Trajectories under Spatio-Temporal Vector Fields

arXiv CS.LG

We introduce a formal active learning methodology for guiding the placement of Lagrangian observers to infer time-dependent vector fields -- a key task in oceanography, marine science, and ocean engineering -- using a physics-informed spatio-temporal Gaussian process surrogate model. The majority of existing placement campaigns either follow standard `space-filling' designs or relatively ad-hoc expert opinions. A key challenge to applying principled active learning in this setting is that Lagran