Related papers: Towards Causal Credit Assignment
Large Language Model (LLM) agents often face significant credit assignment challenges in long-horizon, multi-step tasks due to sparse rewards. Existing value-free methods, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), encounter two…
Causal understanding is important in many disciplines of science and engineering, where we seek to understand how different factors in the system causally affect an experiment or situation and pave a pathway towards creating effective or…
In recent years, reinforcement learning has faced several challenges in the multi-agent domain, such as the credit assignment issue. Value function factorization emerges as a promising way to handle the credit assignment issue under the…
General intelligence requires quick adaption across tasks. While existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods have made progress in generalization, they typically assume only distribution changes between source and target domains. In this…
Designing optimal reward functions has been desired but extremely difficult in reinforcement learning (RL). When it comes to modern complex tasks, sophisticated reward functions are widely used to simplify policy learning yet even a tiny…
Deep reinforcement learning approaches have shown impressive results in a variety of different domains, however, more complex heterogeneous architectures such as world models require the different neural components to be trained separately…
Policies trained via reinforcement learning (RL) are often very complex even for simple tasks. In an episode with $n$ time steps, a policy will make $n$ decisions on actions to take, many of which may appear non-intuitive to the observer.…
Deep learning has achieved impressive prediction accuracies in a variety of scientific and industrial domains. However, the nested non-linear feature of deep learning makes the learning highly non-transparent, i.e., it is still unknown how…
We propose incentive-aligned mechanisms for in-context credit assignment: the task of assigning credit for AI-generated content (e.g. code, news articles, short-form videos) among creators whose intellectual property appears in the context…
Learning policies via preference-based reward learning is an increasingly popular method for customizing agent behavior, but has been shown anecdotally to be prone to spurious correlations and reward hacking behaviors. While much prior work…
One question central to Reinforcement Learning is how to learn a feature representation that supports algorithm scaling and re-use of learned information from different tasks. Successor Features approach this problem by learning a feature…
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) has held longstanding promise to advance reinforcement learning. Yet, it has remained a considerable challenge to develop practical algorithms that exhibit some of these promises. To improve our…
Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) increasingly relies on sparse, outcome-level rewards -- yet determining which actions within a long trajectory caused the outcome remains difficult. This credit assignment (CA)…
Recent advances in reinforcement-learning research have demonstrated impressive results in building algorithms that can out-perform humans in complex tasks. Nevertheless, creating reinforcement-learning systems that can build abstractions…
Consequential decision-making incentivizes individuals to strategically adapt their behavior to the specifics of the decision rule. While a long line of work has viewed strategic adaptation as gaming and attempted to mitigate its effects,…
Representation learning is a central challenge across a range of machine learning areas. In reinforcement learning, effective and functional representations have the potential to tremendously accelerate learning progress and solve more…
Since the earliest days of reinforcement learning, the workhorse method for assigning credit to actions over time has been temporal-difference (TD) learning, which propagates credit backward timestep-by-timestep. This approach suffers when…
Feature attribution is a fundamental task in both machine learning and data analysis, which involves determining the contribution of individual features or variables to a model's output. This process helps identify the most important…
Reweighting a distribution to minimize a distance to a target distribution is a powerful and flexible strategy for estimating a wide range of causal effects, but can be challenging in practice because optimal weights typically depend on…
Reinforcement-learning agents seek to maximize a reward signal through environmental interactions. As humans, our job in the learning process is to design reward functions to express desired behavior and enable the agent to learn such…