{"ID":2837225,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20913","arxiv_id":"2511.20913","title":"Exploring Time-Step Size in Reinforcement Learning for Sepsis Treatment","abstract":"Existing studies on reinforcement learning (RL) for sepsis management have mostly followed an established problem setup, in which patient data are aggregated into 4-hour time steps. Although concerns have been raised regarding the coarseness of this time-step size, which might distort patient dynamics and lead to suboptimal treatment policies, the extent to which this is a problem in practice remains unexplored. In this work, we conducted empirical experiments for a controlled comparison of four time-step sizes ($Δt\\!=\\!1,2,4,8$ h) on this domain, following an identical offline RL pipeline. To enable a fair comparison across time-step sizes, we designed action re-mapping methods that allow for evaluation of policies on datasets with different time-step sizes, and conducted cross-$Δt$ model selections under two policy learning setups. Our goal was to quantify how time-step size influences state representation learning, behavior cloning, policy training, and off-policy evaluation. Our results show that performance trends across $Δt$ vary as learning setups change, while policies learned at finer time-step sizes ($Δt = 1$ h and $2$ h) using a static behavior policy achieve the overall best performance and stability. Our work highlights time-step size as a core design choice in offline RL for healthcare and provides evidence supporting alternatives beyond the conventional 4-hour setup.","short_abstract":"Existing studies on reinforcement learning (RL) for sepsis management have mostly followed an established problem setup, in which patient data are aggregated into 4-hour time steps. Although concerns have been raised regarding the coarseness of this time-step size, which might distort patient dynamics and lead to subop...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20913","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.20913v1","authors":"[\"Yingchuan Sun\",\"Shengpu Tang\"]","published":"2025-11-25T23:05:10Z","proceeding":"cs.LG","tasks":"[\"cs.LG\",\"cs.AI\"]","methods":"[\"Reinforcement Learning\"]","has_code":false}