Uncertainty-Guided Adaptive Conservative Offline Reinforcement Learning for Safer Mechanical Ventilation

Uncertainty-Guided Adaptive Conservative Offline Reinforcement Learning for Safer Mechanical Ventilation

Huidong Liu, Hang Yu, Qiyang Zhang, Jiarui Dou, Xianlei Long, Jiantao Shi, Fuqiang Gu

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
AI and Health. Pages 6788-6796. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/755

Mechanical ventilation (MV) is essential in intensive care units (ICUs), yet conventional protocols lack personalization and risk harmful over- or under-ventilation. Offline reinforcement learning (ORL) enables policy optimization from retrospective clinical data without unsafe online interaction, but existing methods are highly sensitive to distributional shift and out-of-distribution (OOD) actions, limiting their reliability in complex clinical settings. To address these challenges, We propose UBER-CQL (Uncertainty-Balanced Exploration and Robust Conservative Q-Learning), a robust ORL algorithm for safe decision-making under dataset shift. UBER-CQL integrates heteroscedastic Bayesian neural networks with conservative Q-learning to model posterior Q-value uncertainty, which is used to adaptively penalize unreliable high-risk actions while maintaining performance within the data support. We further design numerically stable objectives for conservative Bayesian value estimation. Experiments on in-distribution and OOD subsets of MIMIC-III and eICU demonstrate that UBER-CQL outperforms state-of-the-art ORL and clinician baselines, producing safer and more effective MV strategies.
Keywords:
Clinical decision support system: Clinical decision support system
Medical diagnosis: Medical diagnosis
Treatment recommendation: Treatment recommendation
Precision medicine: Precision medicine