arXiv Machine Learning

Latent Utility Q-Learning for Preference-Adaptive Dynamic Treatment Regimes

arXiv:2307. 12022v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Optimizing individualized treatment sequences for patients who weigh multiple, competing outcomes differently poses a challenge for dynamic treatment regime (DTR) methods, which typically assume a single univariate outcome.

arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Patient-Centered Treatment Planning for Chronic Multimorbidity: A Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Framework for Preference Modeling

The paper introduces FAHOC, a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that models patient preferences by learning high‑level therapeutic options and factored intra‑option policies, while enforcing a cooperation‑aware action masking mechanism. It demonstrates that cooperative patients achieve better health outcomes and that the Q‑function approximation error is bounded. Evaluated on data from ~50,000 comorbid hypertension and type 2 diabetes patients, FAHOC improves quality‑adjusted life years by 0.669, correctly identifies cooperative patients 95.9% of the time, and never violates patient preferences in held‑out tests.

By Nafiseh Payani, Soham Das, G. Anthony Wilson, Anahita Khojandi
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Decision-Centered Abstractions via Orthogonal Estimation of Difference-of-Q Functions

The paper introduces state abstractions that preserve the difference of Q‑functions for offline reinforcement learning, aiming to exclude irrelevant dynamics from rich state data. It proposes a dynamic generalization of the R‑learner that uses orthogonal estimation and sparse learning to estimate the Q‑function contrast, achieving faster convergence and consistency under a margin condition. Experiments on simulated and simulator‑augmented real data show variance reductions and demonstrate that the necessary information for sequential decision‑making can be smaller than that required for full state prediction.

By Defu Cao, Angela Zhou
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 21

Enhancing Personalized Bladder Cancer Treatment Through Reinforcement Learning: A Recurrent Patient State Transition Decision Support Framework

arXiv:2607. 16916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bladder cancer treatment requires personalized and adaptive decision-making, particularly for recurrent disease, where treatment effectiveness changes across successive clinical episodes.

By Divyansh Chawla, Anshu Garg, Isshaan Singh
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Interaction-Limited Safe Continuous-Time RL for Dynamical Medical Treatment

arXiv:2606. 01051v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dynamic medical treatment requires deciding treatment intensity and intervention timing, while patient states evolve continuously and adverse events may occur between clinical interactions.

By Xun Shen, Yuepeng Wang, Akifumi Wachi, Yongqi Zhou, Richard Weiss, Yoshihiko Fujisawa, Ken Kawano, Mehrshad Sadria, Ying Chen, Xin Liu, Sebastien Gros, Xiao Hu, Kyoung-Sook Kim, Mengmou Li, Katsuki Fujisawa, Kenji Wakabayashi
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

Learning Multi-Timescale Interventions under Safety and Resource Constraints

arXiv:2508. 03875v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many sequential decision problems offer qualitatively different ways of influencing the environment: some interventions act immediately, whereas others induce persistent effects that continue to shape future states long after the decision that initiated them.

By David Mguni, Wanrong Yang, Jing Dong, Ziquan Liu, Muhammad Salman Haleem, Baoxiang Wang, Dominik Wojtczak
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 29

Do You Really Need to Pretrain Q-Functions for Online RL Fine-Tuning?

Pre-training followed by fine-tuning has become the dominant recipe for learning performant policies, and in value-based reinforcement learning (RL) this raises a natural question: given a pretrained policy, should the Q-function be pretrained on offline data too? Conventional wisdom suggests it should, but recent results show that online RL with a randomly-initialized Q-function can result in highly performant and reliable policies without needing to pretrain the Q-function.