Related papers: Towards Causal Credit Assignment
Reinforcement learning (RL) can be formulated as a sequence modeling problem, where models predict future actions based on historical state-action-reward sequences. Current approaches typically require long trajectory sequences to model the…
Learning auxiliary tasks, such as multiple predictions about the world, can provide many benefits to reinforcement learning systems. A variety of off-policy learning algorithms have been developed to learn such predictions, but as yet there…
While large language models excel in diverse domains, their performance on complex longhorizon agentic decision-making tasks remains limited. Most existing methods concentrate on designing effective reward models (RMs) to advance…
This paper discusses a system that accelerates reinforcement learning by using transfer from related tasks. Without such transfer, even if two tasks are very similar at some abstract level, an extensive re-learning effort is required. The…
Humans spend a remarkable fraction of waking life engaged in acts of "mental time travel". We dwell on our actions in the past and experience satisfaction or regret. More than merely autobiographical storytelling, we use these event…
A central problem in business concerns the optimal allocation of limited resources to a set of available tasks, where the payoff of these tasks is inherently uncertain. In credit card fraud detection, for instance, a bank can only assign a…
The capability to widely sample the state and action spaces is a key ingredient toward building effective reinforcement learning algorithms. The variational optimization principles exposed in this paper emphasize the importance of an…
In this paper, a new method for assigning credit to search operators is presented. Starting with the principle of optimizing search bias, search operators are selected based on an ability to create solutions that are historically linked to…
The recency heuristic in reinforcement learning is the assumption that stimuli that occurred closer in time to an acquired reward should be more heavily reinforced. The recency heuristic is one of the key assumptions made by TD($\lambda$),…
Preference based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) removes the need to hand specify a reward function by learning a reward from preference feedback over policy behaviors. Current approaches to PbRL do not address the credit assignment problem…
Current reinforcement learning algorithms train an agent using forward-generated trajectories, which provide little guidance so that the agent can explore as much as possible. While realizing the value of reinforcement learning results from…
In strategic classification, an institution (e.g., a bank) anticipates adaptation from users who change their features to increase utility in a classification task (e.g., loan repayment). Since a key challenge is the distribution shift…
Recent work has shown that reinforcement learning agents can develop policies that exploit spurious correlations between rewards and observations. This phenomenon, known as policy confounding, arises because the agent's policy influences…
Temporal credit assignment is crucial for learning and skill development in natural and artificial intelligence. While computational methods like the TD approach in reinforcement learning have been proposed, it's unclear if they accurately…
We investigate the prominent class of fair representation learning methods for bias mitigation. Using causal reasoning to define and formalise different sources of dataset bias, we reveal important implicit assumptions inherent to these…
Recent years have seen a surge of interest in learning high-level causal representations from low-level image pairs under interventions. Yet, existing efforts are largely limited to simple synthetic settings that are far away from…
When deploying artificial agents in real-world environments where they interact with humans, it is crucial that their behavior is aligned with the values, social norms or other requirements of that environment. However, many environments…
Random delays weaken the temporal correspondence between actions and subsequent state feedback, making it difficult for agents to identify the true propagation process of action effects. In cross-task scenarios, changes in task objectives…
Training neural networks with discrete stochastic variables presents a unique challenge. Backpropagation is not directly applicable, nor are the reparameterization tricks used in networks with continuous stochastic variables. To address…
This paper presents a novel approach to root cause attribution of delivery risks within supply chains by integrating causal discovery with reinforcement learning. As supply chains become increasingly complex, traditional methods of root…