Using LLMs to improve RL policies in personalized health adaptive interventions

Karine Karine, Benjamin Marlin


Abstract
Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used in the healthcare domain, particularly for the development of personalized adaptive health interventions. However, RL methods are often applied to this domain using small state spaces to mitigate data scarcity. In this paper, we aim to use Large Language Models (LLMs) to incorporate text-based user preferences and constraints, to update the RL policy. The LLM acts as a filter in the action selection. To evaluate our method, we develop a novel simulation environment that generates text-based user preferences and incorporates corresponding constraints that impact behavioral dynamics. We show that our method can take into account the text-based user preferences, while improving the RL policy, thus improving personalization in adaptive intervention.
Anthology ID:
2025.cl4health-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Patient-Oriented Language Processing (CL4Health)
Month:
May
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Sophia Ananiadou, Dina Demner-Fushman, Deepak Gupta, Paul Thompson
Venues:
CL4Health | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
137–147
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.cl4health-1.11/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Karine Karine and Benjamin Marlin. 2025. Using LLMs to improve RL policies in personalized health adaptive interventions. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Patient-Oriented Language Processing (CL4Health), pages 137–147, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Using LLMs to improve RL policies in personalized health adaptive interventions (Karine & Marlin, CL4Health 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.cl4health-1.11.pdf