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Related papers: Towards Causal Credit Assignment

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This paper proposes a definition of system health in the context of multiple agents optimizing a joint reward function. We use this definition as a credit assignment term in a policy gradient algorithm to distinguish the contributions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-06 Ross E. Allen , Jayesh K. Gupta , Jaime Pena , Yutai Zhou , Javona White Bear , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning algorithms have successfully been applied to temporal credit assignment problems with sparse reward signals. However, state-of-the-art algorithms require manual specification of sub-task structures, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-24 Robert Tjarko Lange , Aldo Faisal

In recent years, the successor representation (SR) has attracted increasing attention in reinforcement learning (RL), and it has been used to address some of its key challenges, such as exploration, credit assignment, and generalization.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Hon Tik Tse , Siddarth Chandrasekar , Marlos C. Machado

Learning depends on changes in synaptic connections deep inside the brain. In multilayer networks, these changes are triggered by error signals fed back from the output, generally through a stepwise inversion of the feedforward processing…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2021-01-05 William F. Podlaski , Christian K. Machens

We propose a new attribution method for neural networks developed using first principles of causality (to the best of our knowledge, the first such). The neural network architecture is viewed as a Structural Causal Model, and a methodology…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-04 Aditya Chattopadhyay , Piyushi Manupriya , Anirban Sarkar , Vineeth N Balasubramanian

The ability to exploit prior experience to solve novel problems rapidly is a hallmark of biological learning systems and of great practical importance for artificial ones. In the meta reinforcement learning literature much recent work has…

Methods of transfer learning try to combine knowledge from several related tasks (or domains) to improve performance on a test task. Inspired by causal methodology, we relax the usual covariate shift assumption and assume that it holds true…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-09-25 Mateo Rojas-Carulla , Bernhard Schölkopf , Richard Turner , Jonas Peters

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms struggle with learning optimal policies for tasks where reward feedback is sparse and depends on a complex sequence of events in the environment. Probabilistic reward machines (PRMs) are finite-state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Jan Corazza , Hadi Partovi Aria , Daniel Neider , Zhe Xu

As a key component to intuitive cognition and reasoning solutions in human intelligence, causal knowledge provides great potential for reinforcement learning (RL) agents' interpretability towards decision-making by helping reduce the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-25 Ruichu Cai , Siyang Huang , Jie Qiao , Wei Chen , Yan Zeng , Keli Zhang , Fuchun Sun , Yang Yu , Zhifeng Hao

Since the advent of autonomous driving technology, it has experienced remarkable progress over the last decade. However, most existing research still struggles to address the challenges posed by environments where multiple vehicles have to…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Jing Wang , Yan Jin , Fei Ding , Chongfeng Wei

Contemporary reinforcement learning with verifiable reward methods post-train language models on multi-step reasoning by assigning a single outcome reward uniformly across all tokens in a trajectory. Such uniform assignment ignores which…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Ankur Samanta , Akshayaa Magesh , Ayush Jain , Youliang Yu , Daniel Jiang , Kavosh Asadi , Kaveh Hassani , Paul Sajda , Jalaj Bhandari , Yonathan Efroni

Reinforcement learning is a machine learning approach based on behavioral psychology. It is focused on learning agents that can acquire knowledge and learn to carry out new tasks by interacting with the environment. However, a problem…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-12-15 Hugo Muñoz , Ernesto Portugal , Angel Ayala , Bruno Fernandes , Francisco Cruz

Humans decompose novel complex tasks into simpler ones to exploit previously learned skills. Analogously, hierarchical reinforcement learning seeks to leverage lower-level policies for simple tasks to solve complex ones. However, because…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Ju-Seung Byun , Andrew Perrault

Robotic manipulation and control has increased in importance in recent years. However, state of the art techniques still have limitations when required to operate in real world applications. This paper explores Hindsight Experience Replay…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Francisco Roldan Sanchez , Stephen Redmond , Kevin McGuinness , Noel O'Connor

In many daily tasks we make multiple decisions before reaching a goal. In order to learn such sequences of decisions, a mechanism to link earlier actions to later reward is necessary. Reinforcement learning theory suggests two classes of…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2019-11-13 Marco Lehmann , He Xu , Vasiliki Liakoni , Michael Herzog , Wulfram Gerstner , Kerstin Preuschoff

In this paper, we explore an approach to auxiliary task discovery in reinforcement learning based on ideas from representation learning. Auxiliary tasks tend to improve data efficiency by forcing the agent to learn auxiliary prediction and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Banafsheh Rafiee , Sina Ghiassian , Jun Jin , Richard Sutton , Jun Luo , Adam White

Performance metrics-driven context caching has a profound impact on throughput and response time in distributed context management systems for real-time context queries. This paper proposes a reinforcement learning based approach to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-02-10 Shakthi Weerasinghe , Arkady Zaslavsky , Seng W. Loke , Amin Abken , Alireza Hassani

Assigning resources in business processes execution is a repetitive task that can be effectively automated. However, different automation methods may give varying results that may not be optimal. Proper resource allocation is crucial as it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-02 Kamil Żbikowski , Michał Ostapowicz , Piotr Gawrysiak

Ranking systems influence decision-making in high-stakes domains like health, education, and employment, where they can have substantial economic and social impacts. This makes the integration of safety mechanisms essential. One such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Antonio Ferrara , Andrea Pugnana , Francesco Bonchi , Salvatore Ruggieri

Reinforcement learning for multi-step reasoning with large language models (LLMs) typically relies on sparse terminal rewards, which creates a poorly conditioned credit-assignment problem: the final feedback is propagated uniformly across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Fei Ding , Yongkang Zhang , Youwei Wang , Zijian Zeng