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Conservative Continuous-Time Treatment Optimization

Machine Learning 2026-03-18 v1 Quantitative Methods

Abstract

We develop a conservative continuous-time stochastic control framework for treatment optimization from irregularly sampled patient trajectories. The unknown patient dynamics are modeled as a controlled stochastic differential equation with treatment as a continuous-time control. Naive model-based optimization can exploit model errors and propose out-of-support controls, so optimizing the estimated dynamics may not optimize the true dynamics. To limit extrapolation, we add a consistent signature-based MMD regularizer on path space that penalizes treatment plans whose induced trajectory distribution deviates from observed trajectories. The resulting objective minimizes a computable upper bound on the true cost. Experiments on benchmark datasets show improved robustness and performance compared to non-conservative baselines.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.16789,
  title  = {Conservative Continuous-Time Treatment Optimization},
  author = {Nora Schneider and Georg Manten and Niki Kilbertus},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.16789},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:24:36.821Z