Related papers: Towards Causal Credit Assignment
We consider the problem of efficient credit assignment in reinforcement learning. In order to efficiently and meaningfully utilize new data, we propose to explicitly assign credit to past decisions based on the likelihood of them having led…
Oftentimes, environments for sequential decision-making problems can be quite sparse in the provision of evaluative feedback to guide reinforcement-learning agents. In the extreme case, long trajectories of behavior are merely punctuated…
Credit assignment is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning, the problem of measuring an action's influence on future rewards. Explicit credit assignment methods have the potential to boost the performance of RL algorithms on many…
We address the problem of credit assignment in reinforcement learning and explore fundamental questions regarding the way in which an agent can best use additional computation to propagate new information, by planning with internal models…
Credit assignment in reinforcement learning is the problem of measuring an action's influence on future rewards. In particular, this requires separating skill from luck, i.e. disentangling the effect of an action on rewards from that of…
Hindsight Credit Assignment (HCA) refers to a recently proposed family of methods for producing more efficient credit assignment in reinforcement learning. These methods work by explicitly estimating the probability that certain actions…
Reinforcement learning is an essential paradigm for solving sequential decision problems under uncertainty. Despite many remarkable achievements in recent decades, applying reinforcement learning methods in the real world remains…
Efficient credit assignment is essential for reinforcement learning algorithms in both prediction and control settings. We describe a unified view on temporal-difference algorithms for selective credit assignment. These selective algorithms…
Any reinforcement learning system must be able to identify which past events contributed to observed outcomes, a problem known as credit assignment. A common solution to this problem is to use an eligibility trace to assign credit to…
How do we formalize the challenge of credit assignment in reinforcement learning? Common intuition would draw attention to reward sparsity as a key contributor to difficult credit assignment and traditional heuristics would look to temporal…
To make reinforcement learning more sample efficient, we need better credit assignment methods that measure an action's influence on future rewards. Building upon Hindsight Credit Assignment (HCA), we introduce Counterfactual Contribution…
The Credit Assignment Problem (CAP) refers to the longstanding challenge of Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents to associate actions with their long-term consequences. Solving the CAP is a crucial step towards the successful deployment of RL…
A reinforcement learning agent that needs to pursue different goals across episodes requires a goal-conditional policy. In addition to their potential to generalize desirable behavior to unseen goals, such policies may also enable…
The ability to transfer knowledge to novel environments and tasks is a sensible desiderata for general learning agents. Despite the apparent promises, transfer in RL is still an open and little exploited research area. In this paper, we…
Sparse reward problems are one of the biggest challenges in Reinforcement Learning. Goal-directed tasks are one such sparse reward problems where a reward signal is received only when the goal is reached. One promising way to train an agent…
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…
Many transfer problems require re-using previously optimal decisions for solving new tasks, which suggests the need for learning algorithms that can modify the mechanisms for choosing certain actions independently of those for choosing…
We present Hindsight Network Credit Assignment (HNCA), a novel learning method for stochastic neural networks, which works by assigning credit to each neuron's stochastic output based on how it influences the output of its immediate…
Temporal credit assignment in reinforcement learning is challenging due to delayed and stochastic outcomes. Monte Carlo targets can bridge long delays between action and consequence but lead to high-variance targets due to stochasticity.…
How much credit (or blame) should an action taken in a state get for a future reward? This is the fundamental temporal credit assignment problem in Reinforcement Learning (RL). One of the earliest and still most widely used heuristics is to…