Transfer Learning Across Patient Variations with Hidden Parameter Markov Decision Processes

Abstract: Due to physiological variation, patients diagnosed with the same condition may exhibit divergent, but related, responses to the same treatments. Hidden Parameter Markov Decision Processes (HiP-MDPs) tackle this transfer-learning problem by embedding these tasks into a low-dimensional space. However, the original formulation of HiP-MDP had a critical flaw: the embedding uncertainty was modeled independently of the agent's state uncertainty, requiring an unnatural training procedure in which all tasks visited every part of the state space---possible for robots that can be moved to a particular location, impossible for human patients. We update the HiP-MDP framework and extend it to more robustly develop personalized medicine strategies for HIV treatment.