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Related papers: Towards Causal Credit Assignment

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Credit assignmen, disentangling each agent's contribution to a shared reward, is a critical challenge in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). To be effective, credit assignment methods must preserve the environment's…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Aditya Kapoor , Kale-ab Tessera , Mayank Baranwal , Harshad Khadilkar , Jan Peters , Stefano Albrecht , Mingfei Sun

The predominant approach in reinforcement learning is to assign credit to actions based on the expected return. However, we show that the return may depend on the policy in a way which could lead to excessive variance in value estimation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Hsiao-Ru Pan , Nico Gürtler , Alexander Neitz , Bernhard Schölkopf

Tasks where the set of possible actions depend discontinuously on the state pose a significant challenge for current reinforcement learning algorithms. For example, a locked door must be first unlocked, and then the handle turned before the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-09 Mrinal Verghese , Chris Atkeson

In this paper we propose a causal modeling approach to intersectional fairness, and a flexible, task-specific method for computing intersectionally fair rankings. Rankings are used in many contexts, ranging from Web search results to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-17 Ke Yang , Joshua R. Loftus , Julia Stoyanovich

When users can benefit from certain predictive outcomes, they may be prone to act to achieve those outcome, e.g., by strategically modifying their features. The goal in strategic classification is therefore to train predictive models that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Guy Horowitz , Nir Rosenfeld

Reinforcement learning has been explored for many problems, from video games with deterministic environments to portfolio and operations management in which scenarios are stochastic; however, there have been few attempts to test these…

General Finance · Quantitative Finance 2024-02-19 Sherly Alfonso-Sánchez , Jesús Solano , Alejandro Correa-Bahnsen , Kristina P. Sendova , Cristián Bravo

This paper proposes a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework for credit underwriting that tackles ungeneralizable contextual challenges. We adapt RL principles for credit scoring, incorporating action space renewal and multi-choice…

This work extends the theory of identifiability in supervised learning by considering the consequences of having access to a distribution of tasks. In such cases, we show that linear identifiability is achievable in the general multi-task…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-08-26 Wenlin Chen , Julien Horwood , Juyeon Heo , José Miguel Hernández-Lobato

Causal representation learning has attracted significant research interest during the past few years, as a means for improving model generalization and robustness. Causal representations of interventional image pairs (also called…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Panagiotis Alimisis , Christos Diou

Deep reinforcement learning has made significant strides in various robotic tasks. However, employing deep reinforcement learning methods to tackle multi-stage tasks still a challenge. Reinforcement learning algorithms often encounter…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Jiechao Deng , Ning Tan

We introduce a class of learning problems where the agent is presented with a series of tasks. Intuitively, if there is relation among those tasks, then the information gained during execution of one task has value for the execution of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-09-06 Christos Dimitrakakis

Training cooperative agents in sparse-reward scenarios poses significant challenges for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Without clear feedback on actions at each step in sparse-reward setting, previous methods struggle with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

While autonomous vehicles (AVs) may perform remarkably well in generic real-life cases, their irrational action in some unforeseen cases leads to critical safety concerns. This paper introduces the concept of collaborative reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Utku Ayvaz , Chih-Hong Cheng , Hao Shen

The ability to adapt to changes in environmental contingencies is an important challenge in reinforcement learning. Indeed, transferring previously acquired knowledge to environments with unseen structural properties can greatly enhance the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Ayman Boustati , Hana Chockler , Daniel C. McNamee

Standard meta-learning for representation learning aims to find a common representation to be shared across multiple tasks. The effectiveness of these methods is often limited when the nuances of the tasks' distribution cannot be captured…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-31 Giulia Denevi , Massimiliano Pontil , Carlo Ciliberto

Assistive agents should make humans' lives easier. Classically, such assistance is studied through the lens of inverse reinforcement learning, where an assistive agent (e.g., a chatbot, a robot) infers a human's intention and then selects…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Vivek Myers , Evan Ellis , Sergey Levine , Benjamin Eysenbach , Anca Dragan

Reward shaping is one of the most effective methods to tackle the crucial yet challenging problem of credit assignment in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, designing shaping functions usually requires much expert knowledge and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-29 Haosheng Zou , Tongzheng Ren , Dong Yan , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

Dealing with severe class imbalance poses a major challenge for real-world applications, especially when the accurate classification and generalization of minority classes is of primary interest. In computer vision, learning from long…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-11-22 Zidi Xiu , Junya Chen , Ricardo Henao , Benjamin Goldstein , Lawrence Carin , Chenyang Tao

Machine learning algorithms are designed to capture complex relationships between features. In this context, the high dimensionality of data often results in poor model performance, with the risk of overfitting. Feature selection, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Paolo Bonetti , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

The estimation of advantage is crucial for a number of reinforcement learning algorithms, as it directly influences the choices of future paths. In this work, we propose a family of estimates based on the order statistics over the path…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-17 Lanxin Lei , Zhizhong Li , Dahua Lin