Transformer-Based Reinforcement Learning for Phase I Dose Allocation

arXiv:2611.00395v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Phase I dose-finding trials must learn from sparse toxicity observations while limiting exposure to overly toxic doses. We develop a single reinforcement-learning policy for trials with different numbers of ordered dose levels. Each dose is represented as a token containing its normalized position, accumulated patient count, observed dose-limiting toxicities (DLTs), and current-dose indicator. A Transformer encoder summarizes the dose tokens, trial-conditioned cross-attention produces a fixed-dimensional trial representation, and a three-action policy chooses de-escalation, staying, or escalation. The final maximum tolerated dose (MTD) decision is deliberately kept outside the learned policy: after the planned sample size, weighted isotonic regression and a prespecified safety cap select the dose closest to the target toxicity probability. In the simulations, toxicity-penalized policies reduce DLT burden while unpenalized policies improve selection accuracy at the cost of greater toxicity. These results demonstrate a controllable safety--accuracy trade-off but do not establish superiority over conventional dose-finding designs.