提出用因果图构建最小马尔可夫状态,结合多阶历史信息提升强化学习性能。
Integrating Causal DAGs in Deep RL: Activating Minimal Markovian States with Multi-Order Exposure

- 基于因果图构造满足马尔可夫性的最小状态表示
- 多阶状态暴露机制在多个基准上超越单一窗口策略
- 揭示神经网络需可控冗余才能利用因果状态信息
在线强化学习依赖马尔可夫性保证性能,但现实应用中常缺乏明确定义的状态,仅由原始观测变量构成。尽管因果强化学习日益受到关注,现有方法通常假设已提供马尔可夫状态,侧重利用因果关系加速学习,却未解决根本问题:给定观测变量上的纵向因果图,如何构造出能证明满足马尔可夫性质的马尔可夫决策过程(MDP)状态?本文提出一种构造方法,可生成证明是最小的状态表示。在深度强化学习中,我们发现仅使用最小表示无法有效提升性能,表明神经网络难以直接利用马尔可夫最小性。为此,我们提出多阶状态暴露(MOSE),将多阶历史状态构型输入同一Q函数。MOSE在常见基准和合成数据集上持续优于最小状态构造与单窗口策略。将最小表示与MOSE结合可进一步提升性能。结果确立了因果深度强化学习的核心原则:最小充分性不足,必须通过受控冗余才能释放因果状态信息的优势。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Online reinforcement learning (RL) relies on the Markov property for guaranteed performance, but real-world applications often lack well-defined states given raw observed variables. While causal RL has attracted growing interest, existing work typically assumes Markovian states are provided and focuses on using causality to accelerate learning, leaving a fundamental gap: \emph{given a longitudinal causal graph over observed variables, how does one construct MDP states that provably satisfy the Markov property?} We address this by providing a procedure that constructs a provably minimal state representation. In deep RL, we observe that the minimal representation alone empirically fails to improve performance, indicating that neural networks cannot directly exploit Markovian minimality. To address this, we propose \textbf{MOSE} (Multi-Order State Exposure), which feeds multi-order historical state constructions into the same $Q$-function. MOSE consistently outperforms both the minimal state construction and single-window policies on common benchmarks and synthetic datasets. Including the minimal representation alongside MOSE can further improve performance. Our results establish a core principle for causal deep RL: minimal sufficiency is not enough, and \emph{controlled redundancy} is necessary to unlock the benefit of causal state information.
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