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Main Authors: Garriga, Tomàs, Almodóvar, Alejandro, Brando, Axel, Sanz, Gerard, de Cambra, Eduard Serrahima, Parras, Juan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16989
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author Garriga, Tomàs
Almodóvar, Alejandro
Brando, Axel
Sanz, Gerard
de Cambra, Eduard Serrahima
Parras, Juan
author_facet Garriga, Tomàs
Almodóvar, Alejandro
Brando, Axel
Sanz, Gerard
de Cambra, Eduard Serrahima
Parras, Juan
contents Individualized treatment selection with continuous actions requires accurate causal response estimation in decision-relevant regions, rather than uniformly over the entire action space. Estimating a global causal response surface and then choosing the treatment that maximizes it can therefore be suboptimal, since standard estimation objectives allocate modeling effort according to the observed treatment distribution rather than the regions that determine the optimal decision. While decision-aware approaches have been studied in unconfounded settings, this problem remains underexplored in proximal causal inference, where proxy variables and bridge functions enable identification under suitable assumptions even in the presence of hidden confounding. Despite recent progress, proximal methods have primarily focused on treatment-effect and potential-outcome estimation rather than treatment selection and optimal decision-making. To bridge this gap, we introduce a policy-targeted weighted bridge loss that emphasizes decision-relevant treatment regions while retaining global stabilization. We prove a regret bound showing that the proposed weighted bridge loss controls treatment-selection regret through a weighted ill-posedness constant. We instantiate the framework in decision-aware variants of several proximal bridge solvers, yielding practical algorithms that alternate between weighted bridge estimation, response-surface projection, policy update, and weight refinement. Empirically, we find that decision-aware weighting reduces regret across several bridge solvers, suggesting improved treatment selection in proximal settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_16989
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Decision-Aware Proximal Bridge Learning for Optimal Treatment Selection
Garriga, Tomàs
Almodóvar, Alejandro
Brando, Axel
Sanz, Gerard
de Cambra, Eduard Serrahima
Parras, Juan
Machine Learning
Individualized treatment selection with continuous actions requires accurate causal response estimation in decision-relevant regions, rather than uniformly over the entire action space. Estimating a global causal response surface and then choosing the treatment that maximizes it can therefore be suboptimal, since standard estimation objectives allocate modeling effort according to the observed treatment distribution rather than the regions that determine the optimal decision. While decision-aware approaches have been studied in unconfounded settings, this problem remains underexplored in proximal causal inference, where proxy variables and bridge functions enable identification under suitable assumptions even in the presence of hidden confounding. Despite recent progress, proximal methods have primarily focused on treatment-effect and potential-outcome estimation rather than treatment selection and optimal decision-making. To bridge this gap, we introduce a policy-targeted weighted bridge loss that emphasizes decision-relevant treatment regions while retaining global stabilization. We prove a regret bound showing that the proposed weighted bridge loss controls treatment-selection regret through a weighted ill-posedness constant. We instantiate the framework in decision-aware variants of several proximal bridge solvers, yielding practical algorithms that alternate between weighted bridge estimation, response-surface projection, policy update, and weight refinement. Empirically, we find that decision-aware weighting reduces regret across several bridge solvers, suggesting improved treatment selection in proximal settings.
title Decision-Aware Proximal Bridge Learning for Optimal Treatment Selection
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16989