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arXiv Machine Learning By Yuxin Xiao, Sheng Zhang, Chandan Singh, Tristan Naumann, Hoifung Poon, Jianfeng Gao, Xiaodong Liu

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

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

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.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Machine Learning.

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