arXiv:2609.01839 · v2
Import What You Need: Learning When and How to Augment EHR Graphs with External Knowledge
摘要
Longitudinal prediction from electronic health records (EHRs) is limited by the sparsity and irregularity in patient trajectories, and knowledge augmentation with external knowledge graphs (KGs) offers a promising way to alleviate these issues. However, KG expansion often follows predefined rules, with limited control over whether and how to augment each visit as a patient's state evolves. We propose ReTA, a Reinforcement learning-based dynamic Topology Augmentation framework that casts KG import as a per-visit, budget-aware policy. ReTA first constructs an offline refined pool of KG-grounded templates, then learns a policy to select one augment action per visit from three options: Soft Import, which enriches node features without modifying graph topology, Hard Import, which grafts a compact KG subgraph onto the visit graph to create message-passing shortcuts, and Skip, which leaves the visit unaugmented when the base encoder is already confident. To stabilize learning, ReTA employs a decoupled encoder that processes semantic and structural signals in separate channels and fuses them via adaptive gating. Experiments on MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV across diagnosis prediction, mortality, and readmission show that ReTA consistently outperforms strong baselines while remaining efficient, with larger gains under sparse supervision. ReTA transfers across datasets and knowledge graphs and yields interpretable augmentation patterns.
作者备注：Accepted to the Main Conference of EMNLP 2026. This revision corrects baseline results and related comparisons, clarifies data preprocessing and evaluation protocols, and revises supplementary analyses