Environmental sustainability assessment based on accounting information audit

P Peng Hou W Wen Lu (Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences (BNLMS), State Key Laboratory of Rare Earth Materials Chemistry and Applications, Beijing Engineering Technology Research Centre of Active Display, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering) Q Qiang Li Q Qihang Wang

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.

Article Details

Journal PLoS ONE
Volume / Issue Vol. 21, Issue 3
Published March 26, 2026
Pages e0345544
ISSN 1932-6203
Publisher Public Library of Science

Journal Info

PLoS ONE

Public Library of Science

ISSN: 1932-6203 Open Access Health Sciences

Authors (4)

P

Peng Hou

W

Wen Lu

Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences (BNLMS), State Key Laboratory of Rare Earth Materials Chemistry and Applications, Beijing Engineering Technology Research Centre of Active Display, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering

Q

Qiang Li

Q

Qihang Wang