The paper introduces an evidence ladder for evaluating reinforcement learning (RL) in healthcare, outlining stages from problem formulation to lifecycle monitoring. It argues that success in historical data does not guarantee real‑world improvement and highlights assumptions and failure modes at each rung. The authors propose reporting practices to support cumulative evaluation and emphasize that RL should be tested as an intervention within a dynamic sociotechnical system.
arXiv:2606. 06800v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mental health struggles wax and wane, yet clinical and wellness interventions typically operate separately, causing frequent breakdowns at care transitions.
arXiv:2606. 19481v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (ORL) offers the potential to improve the quality of clinical decision-making using historical electronic health record (EHR) data.
MInTRL (Minimal Intervention Reinforcement Learning) expands exploration in on-policy reinforcement learning by inserting sparse, local corrections into rollouts via a judge-intervention policy. These interventions replace erroneous suffixes and immediately return control to the main policy, allowing the agent to explore beyond its natural trajectory while maintaining on-policy data. The method uses a sequence-level advantage-regression objective, avoiding importance sampling, and demonstrates superior performance on math and code benchmarks compared to standard on-policy and off-policy baselines.
arXiv:2608. 03606v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Clinical development is sequential decision-making under uncertainty, where a sponsor must plan a portfolio of experiments from heterogeneous evidence.
arXiv:2608. 16831v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative pretraining established reusable task representations; later work on language-based task conditioning and in-context learning showed that a fixed model could adapt its behavior from instructions and demonstrations.
arXiv:2608. 07418v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In medical education, physicians convert academic knowledge into clinical expertise through residency: years of training across thousands of encounters, with diverse sources of feedback and progressively greater autonomy.
arXiv:2606. 28692v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Treatment reasoning underpins every therapeutic decision, integrating disease context, comorbidities, medications, contraindications, and evolving biomedical knowledge to select an appropriate therapy.
arXiv:2607. 18999v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-turn medical consultation agents must decide what to ask, adapt to patient responses, and determine when the collected evidence is sufficient.
arXiv:2608.28599v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Clinical diagnosis is a step-by-step, cost-aware process: a physician orders examinations one at a time, observes the results, and updates the diagnosi...
arXiv:2605. 19208v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Physical activity (PA) plays an important role in maintaining and improving health.
arXiv:2607. 21419v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In long-horizon LLM agent reinforcement learning, weak policies often repeat similar failures, producing uninformative rollout trajectories and limiting effective policy optimization.
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.