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Causal knowledge can be used to support decision-making problems. This has been recognized in the causal bandits literature, where a causal (multi-armed) bandit is characterized by a causal graphical model and a target variable. The arms…

Data augmentation is essential when applying Machine Learning in small-data regimes. It generates new samples following the observed data distribution while increasing their diversity and variability to help researchers and practitioners…

Most major retailers today have multiple divisions focused on various aspects, such as marketing, supply chain, online customer experience, store customer experience, employee productivity, and vendor fulfillment. They also regularly…

We consider a team of reinforcement learning agents that concurrently operate in a common environment, and we develop an approach to efficient coordinated exploration that is suitable for problems of practical scale. Our approach builds on…

Causal dynamics learning has recently emerged as a promising approach to enhancing robustness in reinforcement learning (RL). Typically, the goal is to build a dynamics model that makes predictions based on the causal relationships among…

A reinforcement learning agent tries to maximize its cumulative payoff by interacting in an unknown environment. It is important for the agent to explore suboptimal actions as well as to pick actions with highest known rewards. Yet, in…

Reinforcement learning systems are often concerned with balancing exploration of untested actions against exploitation of actions that are known to be good. The benefit of exploration can be estimated using the classical notion of Value of…

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks where extrinsic rewards from environments are sparse or even totally disregarded. Significant advances based on intrinsic motivation show…

This paper serves to introduce the reader to the field of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and its intersection with methods from the study of causality. We highlight key challenges in MARL and discuss these in the context of how…

Graph data is becoming increasingly prevalent due to the growing demand for relational insights in AI across various domains. Organizations regularly use graph data to solve complex problems involving relationships and connections. Causal…

Causal discovery is to learn cause-effect relationships among variables given observational data and is important for many applications. Existing causal discovery methods assume data sufficiency, which may not be the case in many real world…

Numerous offline and model-based reinforcement learning systems incorporate world models to emulate the inherent environments. A world model is particularly important in scenarios where direct interactions with the real environment is…

Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are stymied by the large numbers of samples required to learn an effective policy. This is especially true when applying RL to real-world control tasks, e.g. in the sciences or…

Bayesian model-based reinforcement learning is a formally elegant approach to learning optimal behaviour under model uncertainty, trading off exploration and exploitation in an ideal way. Unfortunately, finding the resulting Bayes-optimal…

Linear residualization is a common practice for confounding adjustment in machine learning (ML) applications. Recently, causality-aware predictive modeling has been proposed as an alternative causality-inspired approach for adjusting for…

Objective: Causality mining is an active research area, which requires the application of state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques. In the healthcare domain, medical experts create clinical text to overcome the limitation of…

Reinforcement learning provides a framework for learning to control which actions to take towards completing a task through trial-and-error. In many applications observing interactions is costly, necessitating sample-efficient learning. In…

In-context learning for tabular data sets strong predictive standards in observational settings; it however primarily relies on correlational structure, which becomes unreliable under distribution shift or intervention. While established…

The key of sequential recommendation lies in the accurate item correlation modeling. Previous models infer such information based on item co-occurrences, which may fail to capture the real causal relations, and impact the recommendation…

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents improve through trial-and-error, but when reward is sparse and the agent cannot discover successful action sequences, learning stagnates. This has been a notable problem in training deep RL agents to…