An Introduction to Causal Reinforcement Learning
Causal inference provides a set of principles and tools that allow one to combine data and knowledge about an environment to reason with questions of counterfactual nature, i. e.
arXiv:2606. 24160v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal inference provides a set of principles and tools that allow one to combine data and knowledge about an environment to reason with questions of counterfactual nature, i.
Causal inference provides a set of principles and tools that allow one to combine data and knowledge about an environment to reason with questions of counterfactual nature, i. e.
arXiv:2607. 16999v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Credit Assignment Problem (CAP) is fundamental to developing efficient and explainable Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents.
arXiv:2607. 17003v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Imitation learning enables learning a policy in an unknown environment with a latent reward signal using expert demonstrations, but it struggles when the imitator's and expert's observations are mismatched and unobserved confounders are present in expert demonstrations.
arXiv:2609.23753v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative world models aim to predict future states conditioned on actions, where action controllability is fundamental for reliable dynamics modeli...
arXiv:2609.26037v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Explanations are central to causal reasoning, and cognitive science has long established that the human drive to explain is itself a mechanism for lear...
arXiv:2608. 06427v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative models can reproduce an observational distribution while encoding an incorrect causal structure.
arXiv:2606. 04421v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many current agentic systems and LLM pipelines correct mistakes by optimizing outcome reward.
The paper introduces a formal framework that uses symmetries in data to keep causal mechanisms invariant, providing a simple and general mathematical language for causal reasoning. It outlines how to describe models and queries, and presents strategies for rigorously identifying causal effects from data within this framework. The approach reproduces known results for IID data and extends causal analysis to non‑IID settings, complex queries beyond do‑ or soft‑interventions, and incorporates missing data, transfer, and robustness considerations.
The paper introduces Probabilistic Causal Impact (PCI), a framework that blends actual causality (AC) with Pearl’s probability of necessity and sufficiency to provide tractable, causally grounded explanations. PCI reframes explainability as an estimation problem on a probabilistic causal model, enabling efficient approximation via Monte Carlo sampling. The authors evaluate PCI on synthetic and real-world data, demonstrating consistency with AC, scalability, and applicability to complex continuous systems and large-scale causal machine learning models.
arXiv:2606. 19476v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Effective machine learning depends not only on how we model data, but also on what data we choose to collect.
The paper introduces state abstractions that preserve the difference of Q‑functions for offline reinforcement learning, aiming to exclude irrelevant dynamics from rich state data. It proposes a dynamic generalization of the R‑learner that uses orthogonal estimation and sparse learning to estimate the Q‑function contrast, achieving faster convergence and consistency under a margin condition. Experiments on simulated and simulator‑augmented real data show variance reductions and demonstrate that the necessary information for sequential decision‑making can be smaller than that required for full state prediction.
arXiv:2209. 15448v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As AI becomes more prevalent throughout society, effective methods of integrating humans and AI systems that leverage their respective strengths and mitigate risk have become an important priority.