@inproceedings{han-etal-2026-rads,
    title = "{RADS}: Reinforcement Learning-Based Sample Selection Improves Transfer Learning in Low-resource and Imbalanced Clinical Settings",
    author = "Han, Wei  and
      Iraola, David Martinez  and
      Khanina, Anna  and
      Cavedon, Lawrence  and
      Verspoor, Karin",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.608/",
    pages = "12501--12516",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "A common strategy in transfer learning is few shot fine-tuning, but its success is highly dependent on the quality of samples selected as training examples. Active learning methods such as uncertainty sampling and diversity sampling can select useful samples. However, under extremely low-resource and class-imbalanced conditions, they often favor outliers rather than truly informative samples, resulting in degraded performance. In this paper, we introduce RADS (Reinforcement Domain Adaptive Sampling), a robust sample selection strategy using reinforcement learning (RL) to identify the most informative samples. Experimental evaluations on several real world clinical datasets show our sample selection strategy enhances model transferability while maintaining robust performance under extreme class imbalance compared to traditional methods. Our code is open-sourced on GitHub."
}