ALPACA: A Reinforcement Learning Environment for Medication Repurposing and Treatment Optimization in Alzheimer's Disease

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19298v1
• Date: Sun, 22 Feb 2026 18:22:14 GMT
• Title: ALPACA: A Reinforcement Learning Environment for Medication Repurposing and Treatment Optimization in Alzheimer's Disease
• Abstract summary: We present the Alzheimer's Learning Platform for Adaptive Care Agents (ALPACA) for exploring personalized treatment strategies.<n>ALPACA is powered by the Continuous Action-conditioned State Transitions (CAST) model trained on longitudinal trajectories from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI)<n>We show that CAST autoregressively generates realistic medication-conditioned trajectories and that RL policies trained in ALPACA outperform no-treatment and behavior-cloned clinician baselines on memory-related outcomes.
• Score: 2.0411082897313984
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Evaluating personalized, sequential treatment strategies for Alzheimer's disease (AD) using clinical trials is often impractical due to long disease horizons and substantial inter-patient heterogeneity. To address these constraints, we present the Alzheimer's Learning Platform for Adaptive Care Agents (ALPACA), an open-source, Gym-compatible reinforcement learning (RL) environment for systematically exploring personalized treatment strategies using existing therapies. ALPACA is powered by the Continuous Action-conditioned State Transitions (CAST) model trained on longitudinal trajectories from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), enabling medication-conditioned simulation of disease progression under alternative treatment decisions. We show that CAST autoregressively generates realistic medication-conditioned trajectories and that RL policies trained in ALPACA outperform no-treatment and behavior-cloned clinician baselines on memory-related outcomes. Interpretability analyses further indicated that the learned policies relied on clinically meaningful patient features when selecting actions. Overall, ALPACA provides a reusable in silico testbed for studying individualized sequential treatment decision-making for AD.

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