arXiv AI By Oriol Corcoll, Qiyao Wei, Ciar\'{a}n Mark Gilligan-Lee

Beyond Temporal Proximity: Explanatory World Models for Credit Assignment in Reinforcement Learning

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The paper introduces Explanatory World Models (EWM), an attribution framework that leverages explanations from a frontier language model to identify earlier events that plausibly contributed to a delayed outcome. EWM redistributes reward recursively while preserving the undiscounted episode return, and is evaluated on long‑horizon RL benchmarks, a public sequential‑recommendation task, and an industry‑scale generative recommender, consistently outperforming baseline methods, especially when rewards are highly delayed. The study demonstrates that structured explanations can provide reusable credit signals for learning from delayed outcomes.

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