Learning-to-defer for sequential medical decision-making under uncertainty
Learning-to-defer is a framework to automatically defer decision-making to a human expert when ML-based decisions are deemed unreliable. Existing learning-to-defer frameworks are not designed for sequential settings. That is, they defer at every instance independently, based on immediate predictions, while ignoring the potential long-term impact of these interventions. As a result, existing frameworks are myopic. Further, they do not defer adaptively, which is crucial when human interventions are costly. In this work, we propose Sequential Learning-to-Defer (SLTD), a framework for learning-to-defer to a domain expert in sequential decision-making settings. Contrary to existing literature, we pose the problem of learning-to-defer as model-based reinforcement learning (RL) to i) account for long-term consequences of ML-based actions using RL and ii) adaptively defer based on the dynamics (model-based). Our proposed framework determines whether to defer (at each time step) by quantifying whether a deferral now will improve the value compared to delaying deferral to the next time step. To quantify the improvement, we account for potential future deferrals. As a result, we learn a pre-emptive deferral policy (i.e. a policy that defers early if using the ML-based policy could worsen long-term outcomes). Our deferral policy is adaptive to the non-stationarity in the dynamics. We demonstrate that adaptive deferral via SLTD provides an improved trade-off between long-term outcomes and deferral frequency on synthetic, semi-synthetic, and real-world data with non-stationary dynamics. Finally, we interpret the deferral decision by decomposing the propagated (long-term) uncertainty around the outcome, to justify the deferral decision.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Decision MakingDecision Making Under UncertaintyModel-based Reinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)Sequential Decision MakingSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
DeferredSeg:A Multi-Expert Deferral Framework for Medical Image Segmentation
Segmentation models based on deep neural networks demonstrate strong generalization for medical image segmentation. However, they often exhibit overconfidence or underconfidence, leading to unreliable confidence scores f…
Medical Image SegmentationReDAct: Uncertainty-Aware Deferral for LLM Agents
Recently, LLM-based agents have become increasingly popular across many applications, including complex sequential decision-making problems. However, they inherit the tendency of LLMs to hallucinate, leading to incorrect…
Online Decision Deferral under Budget Constraints
Machine Learning (ML) models are increasingly used to support or substitute decision making. In applications where skilled experts are a limited resource, it is crucial to reduce their burden and automate decisions when …
Decision MakingLearning to Guide Human Experts via Personalized Large Language Models
In learning to defer, a predictor identifies risky decisions and defers them to a human expert. One key issue with this setup is that the expert may end up over-relying on the machine's decisions, due to anchoring bias. …
Decision MakingLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingLarge Language Model+1Coherent Hierarchical Multi-Label Learning to Defer for Medical Imaging
Learning to Defer (L2D) enables a model to predict autonomously or defer to an expert, but prior work largely assumes flat label spaces. We study the first L2D setting with hierarchical multi-label decisions, motivated b…
Multi-Label Learning