Environmental sustainability assessment based on accounting information audit

This study proposes a novel feature extraction framework that integrates reinforcement learning-guided steganographic encoding with an improved EfficientNetV2 backbone, specifically tailored for sustainable accounting and environmental auditing tasks. By embedding a domain-adaptive multi-branch attention mechanism and leveraging a lightweight residual policy network, the model is capable of capturing subtle patterns in noisy, imbalanced, and partially missing datasets. Experimental results on three real-world ESG-related (Environment, Society, Governance) accounting datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of classification accuracy, robustness, and explainability. The model achieves an average AUC (Area Under the Curve) improvement of 4.7% and a 12.5% reduction in feature redundancy. Additionally, it exhibits superior performance in privacy-constrained scenarios through embedded steganographic masking. These findings underscore the framework's potential for real-world deployment in regulatory auditing, automated compliance, and sustainable financial intelligence.

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Publication Details

Journal
PLoS ONE
Published
2026-03-26
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0345544
Primary Topic
Financial Reporting and XBRL
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00
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article

Environmental sustainability assessment based on accounting information audit

Peng Hou, Wen Lu, Qihang Wang, Qiang Li
PLoS ONE
Financial Reporting and XBRL
article

Environmental sustainability assessment based on accounting information audit

Peng Hou, Wen Lu, Qihang Wang, Qiang Li
article en

Abstract

This study proposes a novel feature extraction framework that integrates reinforcement learning-guided steganographic encoding with an improved EfficientNetV2 backbone, specifically tailored for sustainable accounting and environmental auditing tasks. By embedding a domain-adaptive multi-branch attention mechanism and leveraging a lightweight residual policy network, the model is capable of capturing subtle patterns in noisy, imbalanced, and partially missing datasets. Experimental results on three real-world ESG-related (Environment, Society, Governance) accounting datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of classification accuracy, robustness, and explainability. The model achieves an average AUC (Area Under the Curve) improvement of 4.7% and a 12.5% reduction in feature redundancy. Additionally, it exhibits superior performance in privacy-constrained scenarios through embedded steganographic masking. These findings underscore the framework's potential for real-world deployment in regulatory auditing, automated compliance, and sustainable financial intelligence.

PLoS ONEVol. 21(3)
Shanghai Technical Institute of Electronics & Information (CN), Zhengzhou Business University (CN)
Life in Land, Responsible consumption and production
Openalex Percentile: Top 4%
Financial Reporting and XBRL
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Environmental sustainability assessment based on accounting information audit — Peng Hou, Wen Lu, et al. · PLoS ONE (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS