Learning Preference-Based Objectives from Clinical Narratives for Sequential Treatment Decision-Making

arXiv:2604.10783v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Designing reward functions remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) for healthcare, where outcomes are sparse, delayed, and difficult to specify. While structured data capture physiological states, they often fail to reflect the overall quality of a patient's clinical trajectory, including recovery dynamics, treatment burden, and stability. Clinical narratives, in contrast, summarize longitudinal reasoning and implicitly encode ev