Related papers: Towards Causal Credit Assignment
In the rapidly evolving field of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), understanding the dynamics of open systems is crucial. Openness in MARL refers to the dynam-ic nature of agent populations, tasks, and agent types with-in a system.…
Policy gradient methods are appealing in deep reinforcement learning but suffer from high variance of gradient estimate. To reduce the variance, the state value function is applied commonly. However, the effect of the state value function…
We show that discounted methods for solving continuing reinforcement learning problems can perform significantly better if they center their rewards by subtracting out the rewards' empirical average. The improvement is substantial at…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in a wide range of sequential decision-making problems. Recent diffusion-based policies further improve RL by modeling complex, high-dimensional action distributions. However,…
In this paper, we confront the problem of applying reinforcement learning to agents that perceive the environment through many sensors and that can perform parallel actions using many actuators as is the case in complex autonomous robots.…
In this paper, we consider the problem of actor-critic reinforcement learning. Firstly, we extend the actor-critic architecture to actor-critic-N architecture by introducing more critics beyond rewards. Secondly, we combine the reward-based…
Causal inference often hinges on strong assumptions - such as no unmeasured confounding or perfect compliance - that are rarely satisfied in practice. Partial identification offers a principled alternative: instead of relying on…
Behavioral cloning reduces policy learning to supervised learning by training a discriminative model to predict expert actions given observations. Such discriminative models are non-causal: the training procedure is unaware of the causal…
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.…
Reinforcement learning, which acquires a policy maximizing long-term rewards, has been actively studied. Unfortunately, this learning type is too slow and difficult to use in practical situations because the state-action space becomes huge…
Most model-free reinforcement learning methods leverage state representations (embeddings) for generalization, but either ignore structure in the space of actions or assume the structure is provided a priori. We show how a policy can be…
The temporal credit assignment problem is a central challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL), concerned with attributing the appropriate influence to each actions in a trajectory for their ability to achieve a goal. However, when feedback…
The two fields of machine learning and graphical causality arose and developed separately. However, there is now cross-pollination and increasing interest in both fields to benefit from the advances of the other. In the present paper, we…
Multi-agent proximal policy optimization (MAPPO) has recently demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on challenging multi-agent reinforcement learning tasks. However, MAPPO still struggles with the credit assignment problem, wherein the…
Exploration and credit assignment under sparse rewards are still challenging problems. We argue that these challenges arise in part due to the intrinsic rigidity of operating at the level of actions. Actions can precisely define how to…
Reinforcement learning algorithms have had tremendous successes in online learning settings. However, these successes have relied on low-stakes interactions between the algorithmic agent and its environment. In many settings where RL could…
Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE) has been a popular paradigm in cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) settings and is widely used in many real applications. One of the major challenges in the training…
Fairness-aware learning studies the development of algorithms that avoid discriminatory decision outcomes despite biased training data. While most studies have concentrated on immediate bias in static contexts, this paper highlights the…
Value estimation is a critical component of the reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm. The question of how to effectively learn value predictors from data is one of the major problems studied by the RL community, and different approaches…
In this paper, we study a transfer reinforcement learning problem where the state transitions and rewards are affected by the environmental context. Specifically, we consider a demonstrator agent that has access to a context-aware policy…