arXiv Machine Learning

Reinforcement Learning over Patient Trajectories for Clinical Reasoning in EHR Foundation Models

The paper proposes a reinforcement learning (RL) fine‑tuning framework for electronic health record (EHR) foundation models, treating them as generative policies over patient trajectories. By framing clinical prediction tasks such as hospital readmission as event‑conditioned, time‑windowed reasoning problems and designing time‑aware, rollout‑sensitive rewards, the authors show that RL fine‑tuning consistently outperforms pre‑trained backbones and strong baselines. The approach enables smaller models to surpass larger pre‑trained models in data‑limited settings, induces positive transfer across tasks, and produces trajectories with stronger structural and semantic alignment to ground truth, improving downstream utility.

arXiv AI
Jun 3

ChatHealthAI: Aligning Electronic Health Record Representations with Large Language Models for Grounded Clinical Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 02802v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong natural-language reasoning abilities for clinical decision support, but struggle to effectively model structured longitudinal electronic health records (EHRs).

By Bo-Hong Wang, Baicheng Peng, Ruilin Wang, Jun Bai, Ziyang Song, Yue Li
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

CARE: Causally-Aligned Reasoning Exploration for Medical Large Language Models

CARE: Causally-Aligned Reasoning Exploration for Medical Large Language Models proposes a new framework to improve medical reasoning in LLMs. It introduces two key conditions—Causal Sufficiency and Proximal Learnability—to curate high-quality training trajectories, using agreement-based self-verification and dynamic entropy bounds. Experiments on medical multimodal and text-only benchmarks show that CARE outperforms competitors, reducing incorrect reasoning and enhancing training stability.

By Yucheng Zhou, Peng Luo, Qianning Wang, Chengzhong Xu, Jianbing Shen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 8

One Loss to Rule Them All: Marked Time-to-Event for Structured EHR Foundation Models

arXiv:2602. 00541v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Clinical events captured in Electronic Health Records (EHR) are irregularly sampled and may consist of a mixture of discrete events and numerical measurements, such as laboratory values or treatment dosages.

By Zilin Jing, Vincent Jeanselme, Yuta Kobayashi, Simon A. Lee, Chao Pang, Aparajita Kashyap, Yanwei Li, Xinzhuo Jiang, Shalmali Joshi
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 20

LLM4EHR: Aligning Clinical Time Series with Medical Event Sequences via Large Language Models

arXiv:2607. 15447v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent research in clinical machine learning, focusing on outcome predictions in intensive care unit (ICU), has shifted from bespoke supervised models to foundation models, utilising modern representation learning methods.

By Jingteng Li, Alexander Capstick, Louise Rigny, Iona Biggart, Neil J Sebire, Payam Barnaghi
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

EHR2Path: Comprehensive Pathway-Level Modeling of Longitudinal Patient Trajectories from Multimodal Electronic Health Records

arXiv:2506. 04831v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Forecasting how a patient's condition is likely to evolve, including possible deterioration, recovery, treatment needs, and care transitions, could support more proactive and personalized care, but requires modeling heterogeneous and longitudinal electronic health record (EHR) data.

By Chantal Pellegrini, Ege \"Ozsoy, David Bani-Harouni, Matthias Keicher, Nassir Navab
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

OncoReason: Structuring Clinical Reasoning in LLMs for Robust and Interpretable Survival Prediction

arXiv:2510. 17532v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Predicting cancer treatment outcomes requires models that are both accurate and interpretable, particularly in the presence of heterogeneous clinical data.

By Raghu Vamshi Hemadri, Geetha Krishna Guruju, Kristi Topollai, Anna Ewa Choromanska
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 21

Explainable Transformer Models for Clinical Prediction Tasks on Structured Electronic Health Records

arXiv:2608. 20315v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predictive models over structured electronic health records (EHRs) remain central to machine learning for healthcare, but few have jointly emphasized quantitative laboratory information and interpretability with respect to input medical events.

By Jun Ni Du, Lukas Adamek, Maxim Kryukov, Flavio Dormont, Ziv Bar-Joseph, Sven Jager, Brandon Rufino
arXiv AI
Sep 7

REFINE: LLM Refinement over Budgeted Text-Attributed Graphs for Personalized Medical Concept Representation

REFINE is a framework that refines medical concept representations by creating patient‑specific temporal graphs from a global text‑attributed knowledge graph. It uses a reinforcement learning policy to allocate a personalized graph expansion budget for each observed code, then processes the resulting graph with a heterogeneous GNN and a frozen LLM that refines representations via graph‑aware soft prompts. Experiments on MIMIC‑III and MIMIC‑IV demonstrate that REFINE consistently improves various EHR prediction backbones, surpasses strong baselines, and shows robust gains across ablation studies, KG selection, and data insufficiency scenarios.

By Mohsen Nayebi Kerdabadi, Arya Hadizadeh Moghaddam, Dongjie Wang, Zijun Yao