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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Richens, Jonathan, Everitt, Tom
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.10877
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author Richens, Jonathan
Everitt, Tom
author_facet Richens, Jonathan
Everitt, Tom
contents It has long been hypothesised that causal reasoning plays a fundamental role in robust and general intelligence. However, it is not known if agents must learn causal models in order to generalise to new domains, or if other inductive biases are sufficient. We answer this question, showing that any agent capable of satisfying a regret bound under a large set of distributional shifts must have learned an approximate causal model of the data generating process, which converges to the true causal model for optimal agents. We discuss the implications of this result for several research areas including transfer learning and causal inference.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_10877
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Robust agents learn causal world models
Richens, Jonathan
Everitt, Tom
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
It has long been hypothesised that causal reasoning plays a fundamental role in robust and general intelligence. However, it is not known if agents must learn causal models in order to generalise to new domains, or if other inductive biases are sufficient. We answer this question, showing that any agent capable of satisfying a regret bound under a large set of distributional shifts must have learned an approximate causal model of the data generating process, which converges to the true causal model for optimal agents. We discuss the implications of this result for several research areas including transfer learning and causal inference.
title Robust agents learn causal world models
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.10877