Active Learning for Low-Altitude Radio Map Construction via Plug-and-Play Flow Matching

Abstract

The deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in low-altitude airspace requires accurate and timely radio maps for reliable communication and safe navigation. However, constructing such radio maps is challenging due to the prohibitive overhead of exhaustive measurements and the limited flight endurance of UAVs. To address this challenge, we propose an active learning framework based on flow matching for efficient low-altitude radio map construction from sparse measurements. We first analyze a plug-and-play (PnP) inference scheme with a flow-matching prior. By characterizing the late-stage refinement behavior through an ordinary differential equation (ODE), we theoretically show how the inference steps smoothly align with a continuous ODE flow to refine the map details. Recognizing that the early generative stages are largely noise-dominated, this insight motivates our proposed truncated flow matching plug-and-play (TFM-PnP) approach. TFM-PnP utilizes a spatial interpolation-based initialization to start the reconstruction from an intermediate flow time, thereby bypassing the inefficient early stages. We further use the generative diversity of flow matching to derive an uncertainty map to guide the UAV trajectory design. Specifically, we propose a weighted sampling approach to select a target location, followed by a Utility-Aware Path Search (UAPS) algorithm to design the corresponding UAV trajectories. Simulation results based on Sionna ray-tracing datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms the considered baselines, achieving more than 50% reduction in normalized mean squared error (NMSE).