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:2607. 16999v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Credit Assignment Problem (CAP) is fundamental to developing efficient and explainable Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents.
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.
arXiv:2608. 08255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) often suffers from delayed and sparse rewards in real-world environments.
The paper introduces Retrospective World Modeling, a new paradigm for vision‑language‑model (VLM) agents that allows them to reason backward by estimating which action most likely caused a state transition. It proposes the Self‑Consistency Reward (SCR), an intrinsic signal that measures how well a policy action aligns with this retrospective explanation, providing dense transition‑level feedback. Experiments demonstrate that incorporating SCR improves policy robustness and generalization compared to purely prospective world‑modeling approaches.
arXiv:2602. 08335v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with external tools via multi-agent systems offers a promising new paradigm for decomposing and solving complex problems.
arXiv:2603. 21563v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Collaborative multi-agent large language models (LLMs) can solve complex reasoning tasks by decomposing roles, but reinforcement learning for such systems is limited by credit assignment: shared terminal rewards obscure individual contributions and can encourage free-riding.
arXiv:2606. 18810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has driven substantial progress in training LLMs for reasoning tasks, but representative methods such as GRPO assign uniform credit across all tokens, wasting gradient on routine tokens while under-crediting pivotal reasoning steps.
arXiv:2606. 09348v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon agentic tasks pose a fundamental credit assignment challenge for outcome-base reinforcement learning: trajectory-level rewards verify final correctness but provide limited guidance on which intermediate reasoning steps or tool interactions contribute to the outcome.
arXiv:2511. 10687v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) in multi-agent systems (MAS) have shown promise for complex tasks, yet current training methods lack principled ways to connect system-level evaluation with agent- and message-level learning.
arXiv:2606. 11284v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world multi-agent systems, from traffic coordination to resource allocation, are often modeled as general-sum games where individual incentives conflict with collective welfare.
arXiv:2609.36178v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has become a promising approach for training large language model agents. However, its uniform assignment o...
Temporal credit assignment is central to both biological and artificial intelligence, yet its interaction with non-linear function approximation is poorly understood. We identify a systematic failure mode in deep reinforcement learning (RL) termed Trace-Mediated Peak Bias (TMPB).