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Related papers: Causal Confusion in Imitation Learning

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Causal models of agents have been used to analyse the safety aspects of machine learning systems. But identifying agents is non-trivial -- often the causal model is just assumed by the modeler without much justification -- and modelling…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-08-25 Zachary Kenton , Ramana Kumar , Sebastian Farquhar , Jonathan Richens , Matt MacDermott , Tom Everitt

Despite the excelling performance of machine learning models, understanding their decisions remains a long-standing goal. Although commonly used attribution methods from explainable AI attempt to address this issue, they typically rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Juan Miguel Lopez Alcaraz , Nils Strodthoff

Adapting to latent confounded shift remains a core challenge in modern AI. This setting is driven by hidden variables that induce spurious correlations between inputs and outputs during training, leading models to rely on non-causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Jialin Yu , Yuxiang Zhou , Haoxuan Li , Junchi Yu , Mengyue Yang , Yulan He , Nevin L. Zhang , Philip Torr , Ricardo Silva

Imitation learning holds great promise for addressing the complex task of autonomous urban driving, as experienced human drivers can navigate highly challenging scenarios with ease. While behavior cloning is a widely used imitation learning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-05-05 Ke Guo , Wei Jing , Junbo Chen , Jia Pan

Imitation Learning (IL) is a widely adopted approach which enables agents to learn from human expert demonstrations by framing the task as a supervised learning problem. However, IL often suffers from causal confusion, where agents…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Amin Banayeeanzade , Fatemeh Bahrani , Yutai Zhou , Erdem Bıyık

In many areas, we have well-founded insights about causal structure that would be useful to bring into our trained models while still allowing them to learn in a data-driven fashion. To achieve this, we present the new method of interchange…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-22 Atticus Geiger , Zhengxuan Wu , Hanson Lu , Josh Rozner , Elisa Kreiss , Thomas Icard , Noah D. Goodman , Christopher Potts

Much of the causal discovery literature prioritises guaranteeing the identifiability of causal direction in statistical models. For structures within a Markov equivalence class, this requires strong assumptions which may not hold in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-29 Anish Dhir , Samuel Power , Mark van der Wilk

Recent years have witnessed the rapid growth of machine learning in a wide range of fields such as image recognition, text classification, credit scoring prediction, recommendation system, etc. In spite of their great performance in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-20 Guandong Xu , Tri Dung Duong , Qian Li , Shaowu Liu , Xianzhi Wang

Learning causal structure from observational data is a fundamental challenge in machine learning. However, the majority of commonly used differentiable causal discovery methods are non-identifiable, turning this problem into a continuous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-30 Yu Wang , An Zhang , Xiang Wang , Yancheng Yuan , Xiangnan He , Tat-Seng Chua

Methods of transfer learning try to combine knowledge from several related tasks (or domains) to improve performance on a test task. Inspired by causal methodology, we relax the usual covariate shift assumption and assume that it holds true…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-09-25 Mateo Rojas-Carulla , Bernhard Schölkopf , Richard Turner , Jonas Peters

Animals exhibit an innate ability to learn regularities of the world through interaction. By performing experiments in their environment, they are able to discern the causal factors of variation and infer how they affect the world's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-10 Sumedh A. Sontakke , Arash Mehrjou , Laurent Itti , Bernhard Schölkopf

[Context] Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has achieved notable success in environments where agents must learn coordinated behaviors. However, transferring knowledge across agents remains challenging in non-stationary environments…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Kathrin Korte , Christian Medeiros Adriano , Sona Ghahremani , Holger Giese

Learning about the causal structure of the world is a fundamental problem for human cognition. Causal models and especially causal learning have proved to be difficult for large pretrained models using standard techniques of deep learning.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Eunice Yiu , Kelsey Allen , Shiry Ginosar , Alison Gopnik

Despite alarm over the reliance of machine learning systems on so-called spurious patterns, the term lacks coherent meaning in standard statistical frameworks. However, the language of causality offers clarity: spurious associations are due…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-02-18 Divyansh Kaushik , Eduard Hovy , Zachary C. Lipton

Using offline datasets to evaluate conversational agents often fails to cover rare scenarios or to support testing new policies. This has motivated the use of controllable user simulators for targeted, counterfactual evaluation, typically…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Guy Tennenholtz , Ofer Meshi , Amir Globerson , Uri Shalit , Jihwan Jeong , Craig Boutilier

Robots should be able to learn complex behaviors from human demonstrations. In practice, these human-provided datasets are inevitably imbalanced: i.e., the human demonstrates some subtasks more frequently than others. State-of-the-art…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Sagar Parekh , Heramb Nemlekar , Dylan P. Losey

Interference bias is a major impediment to identifying causal effects in real-world settings. For example, vaccination reduces the transmission of a virus in a population such that everyone benefits -- even those who are not treated. This…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-03-25 Michael O'Riordan , Ciarán M. Gilligan-Lee

A decision-maker must consider cofounding bias when attempting to apply machine learning prediction, and, while feature selection is widely recognized as important process in data-analysis, it could cause cofounding bias. A causal Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-02 Akihiro Yabe

Crowd simulation, the study of the movement of multiple agents in complex environments, presents a unique application domain for machine learning. One challenge in crowd simulation is to imitate the movement of expert agents in highly dense…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2019-10-03 Gang Qiao , Honglu Zhou , Mubbasir Kapadia , Sejong Yoon , Vladimir Pavlovic

Predictive models -- learned from observational data not covering the complete data distribution -- can rely on spurious correlations in the data for making predictions. These correlations make the models brittle and hinder generalization.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Khurram Javed , Martha White , Yoshua Bengio