提出安全框架,让医疗强化学习在不偏离临床经验的前提下优化治疗策略。
Offline Guarded Safe Reinforcement Learning for Medical Treatment Optimization Strategies
- 构建双约束机制,限制策略探索范围以保证安全性和可靠性。
- 在真实数据上实现比医生推荐更优的长期治疗效果,且无偏离临床范围风险。
- 适合需要安全优化医疗决策的研究者与临床算法开发者。
在医疗场景中应用离线强化学习时,分布外(OOD)问题带来显著风险,因超出临床经验的泛化可能导致有害建议。现有方法如保守Q学习(CQL)仅通过抑制不确定动作来约束行为,但无法调控下游状态轨迹,难以发现更优的长期治疗策略。为此,我们提出离线守护安全强化学习(OGSRL),一个理论完备的基于模型的离线强化学习框架。OGSRL引入双重约束机制:首先,建立分布外守护器,划定临床验证的安全区域,确保策略优化在此区域内进行,从而利用完整患者历史安全地探索优于医生行为的治疗方案;其次,引入安全成本约束,编码生理安全边界等医学知识,在训练数据可能包含潜在危险干预的区域提供领域特异性防护。我们提供了安全性与近最优性的理论保障:满足约束的策略将保持在安全可靠区域,并达到接近数据支持的最佳性能。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
When applying offline reinforcement learning (RL) in healthcare scenarios, the out-of-distribution (OOD) issues pose significant risks, as inappropriate generalization beyond clinical expertise can result in potentially harmful recommendations. While existing methods like conservative Q-learning (CQL) attempt to address the OOD issue, their effectiveness is limited by only constraining action selection by suppressing uncertain actions. This action-only regularization imitates clinician actions that prioritize short-term rewards, but it fails to regulate downstream state trajectories, thereby limiting the discovery of improved long-term treatment strategies. To safely improve policy beyond clinician recommendations while ensuring that state-action trajectories remain in-distribution, we propose \textit{Offline Guarded Safe Reinforcement Learning} ($\mathsf{OGSRL}$), a theoretically grounded model-based offline RL framework. $\mathsf{OGSRL}$ introduces a novel dual constraint mechanism for improving policy with reliability and safety. First, the OOD guardian is established to specify clinically validated regions for safe policy exploration. By constraining optimization within these regions, it enables the reliable exploration of treatment strategies that outperform clinician behavior by leveraging the full patient state history, without drifting into unsupported state-action trajectories. Second, we introduce a safety cost constraint that encodes medical knowledge about physiological safety boundaries, providing domain-specific safeguards even in areas where training data might contain potentially unsafe interventions. Notably, we provide theoretical guarantees on safety and near-optimality: policies that satisfy these constraints remain in safe and reliable regions and achieve performance close to the best possible policy supported by the data.
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