让强化学习看清因果关系,提升策略在变化环境中的泛化能力。
Towards Causal Model-Based Policy Optimization
- 从在线轨迹中学习局部因果结构,构建可干预的因果马尔可夫决策过程。
- 通过反事实模拟优化策略,在分布外扰动下仍保持稳定性能。
- 适合需要高鲁棒性与可解释性的实际决策场景,如自动驾驶、医疗调控。
现实世界的决策问题常面临复杂且不确定的动态变化,传统基于模型的强化学习(MBRL)通过查询轨迹学习环境动态模型,并利用该模型进行仿真以优化策略。然而,这类方法未考虑环境背后的因果机制,容易捕捉虚假相关性,对分布偏移敏感,泛化能力受限。本文提出因果模型增强型策略优化框架(C-MBPO),将因果学习融入MBRL流程。核心是通过在线轨迹学习状态与奖励转移的局部结构因果模型(SCM),构建因果马尔可夫决策过程(C-MDP)。C-MDP能通过关联的因果贝叶斯网络分解环境中的因果依赖,支持定向干预与反事实推理,使智能体区分统计相关与真实因果。所学因果模型用于模拟假设动作下的反事实状态转移与奖励,指导更有效的策略优化。实验表明,该方法对影响虚假非因果关系的分布外漂移具有鲁棒性,验证了其在近域与远域分布外动态漂移下的优势。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Real-world decision-making problems are often marked by complex, uncertain dynamics that can shift or break under changing conditions. Traditional Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) approaches learn predictive models of environment dynamics from queried trajectories and then use these models to simulate rollouts for policy optimization. However, such methods do not account for the underlying causal mechanisms that govern the environment, and thus inadvertently capture spurious correlations, making them sensitive to distributional shifts and limiting their ability to generalize. The same naturally holds for model-free approaches. In this work, we introduce Causal Model-Based Policy Optimization (C-MBPO), a novel framework that integrates causal learning into the MBRL pipeline to achieve more robust, explainable, and generalizable policy learning algorithms. Our approach centers on first inferring a Causal Markov Decision Process (C-MDP) by learning a local Structural Causal Model (SCM) of both the state and reward transition dynamics from trajectories gathered online. C-MDPs differ from classic MDPs in that we can decompose causal dependencies in the environment dynamics via specifying an associated Causal Bayesian Network. C-MDPs allow for targeted interventions and counterfactual reasoning, enabling the agent to distinguish between mere statistical correlations and causal relationships. The learned SCM is then used to simulate counterfactual on-policy transitions and rewards under hypothetical actions (or ``interventions"), thereby guiding policy optimization more effectively. The resulting policy learned by C-MBPO can be shown to be robust to a class of distributional shifts that affect spurious, non-causal relationships in the dynamics. We demonstrate this through some simple experiments involving near and far OOD dynamics drifts.
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