Intelligent vulnerability assessment system for college students mental health based on few-sample reinforcement learning approach

Abstract

College students’ psychological vulnerability assessment is constrained by data scarcity, high labeling cost, privacy sensitivity, and small, imbalanced samples, and existing frameworks typically treat vulnerability as a static judgment that cannot track how a student’s condition changes over time. This study examined whether a few-sample hierarchical grading model combined with meta-reinforcement-learning-based sequential decision-making could address both problems jointly. A few-sample hierarchical grading model, combining meta-learning and transfer regularization with a prototype-based embedding and ordinal threshold assignment, quantified static risk from a handful of labeled examples per grade, while a sequential risk-identification method formulated dynamic assessment as a Markov decision process solved by a two-stage meta-reinforcement-learning policy. Case studies used a longitudinal, class-imbalanced cohort simulation calibrated to the documented statistics of a mobile-sensing mental-health study (no real participant data were used) and compared the proposed models against threshold-rule, supervised, fine-tuned, few-shot, and non-meta reinforcement-learning baselines, with sensitivity analyses on support-set size, reward weights, discount factor, and regularization weight, plus a regime-switching robustness check. The proposed grading model attained a macro-F1 of 0.847 with ten labeled examples per grade, over twenty percentage points above a conventional deep-learning classifier, though its edge over other episodic few-shot architectures was small and inconsistent, indicating episodic meta-learning as the main source of this gain. The meta-reinforcement-learning policy achieved a higher alert precision-recall area (0.514 vs. 0.380) than a non-meta baseline and avoided its degenerate always-escalate behavior, but neither the main study nor the regime-switching check showed the composite reward lengthening lead time versus a simpler accuracy-only reward, which matched its lead time at a much lower escalation rate. Sensitivity analyses showed the reward-weight ratio and discount factor shaping the early-identification versus intervention-cost trade-off. These findings suggest that combining few-sample meta-learning with metareinforcement-learning-based sequential decision-making can improve vulnerability assessment under scarce, evolving data relative to conventional static and non-meta-adapted approaches, with an accuracy-only reward recommended as the practical default. The case studies relied on a calibrated simulation rather than raw longitudinal records, so prospective validation on real campus data under appropriate privacy safeguards is needed before responsible deployment.