Curious Causality-Seeking Agents Learn Meta Causal World

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhao, Zhiyu, Li, Haoxuan, Zhang, Haifeng, Wang, Jun, Faccio, Francesco, Schmidhuber, Jürgen, Yang, Mengyue
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhao, Zhiyu
Li, Haoxuan
Zhang, Haifeng
Wang, Jun
Faccio, Francesco
Schmidhuber, Jürgen
Yang, Mengyue
author_facet Zhao, Zhiyu
Li, Haoxuan
Zhang, Haifeng
Wang, Jun
Faccio, Francesco
Schmidhuber, Jürgen
Yang, Mengyue
contents When building a world model, a common assumption is that the environment has a single, unchanging underlying causal rule, like applying Newton's laws to every situation. In reality, what appears as a drifting causal mechanism is often the manifestation of a fixed underlying mechanism seen through a narrow observational window. This brings about a problem that, when building a world model, even subtle shifts in policy or environment states can alter the very observed causal mechanisms. In this work, we introduce the \textbf{Meta-Causal Graph} as world models, a minimal unified representation that efficiently encodes the transformation rules governing how causal structures shift across different latent world states. A single Meta-Causal Graph is composed of multiple causal subgraphs, each triggered by meta state, which is in the latent state space. Building on this representation, we introduce a \textbf{Causality-Seeking Agent} whose objectives are to (1) identify the meta states that trigger each subgraph, (2) discover the corresponding causal relationships by agent curiosity-driven intervention policy, and (3) iteratively refine the Meta-Causal Graph through ongoing curiosity-driven exploration and agent experiences. Experiments on both synthetic tasks and a challenging robot arm manipulation task demonstrate that our method robustly captures shifts in causal dynamics and generalizes effectively to previously unseen contexts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_23068
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Curious Causality-Seeking Agents Learn Meta Causal World
Zhao, Zhiyu
Li, Haoxuan
Zhang, Haifeng
Wang, Jun
Faccio, Francesco
Schmidhuber, Jürgen
Yang, Mengyue
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Applications
When building a world model, a common assumption is that the environment has a single, unchanging underlying causal rule, like applying Newton's laws to every situation. In reality, what appears as a drifting causal mechanism is often the manifestation of a fixed underlying mechanism seen through a narrow observational window. This brings about a problem that, when building a world model, even subtle shifts in policy or environment states can alter the very observed causal mechanisms. In this work, we introduce the \textbf{Meta-Causal Graph} as world models, a minimal unified representation that efficiently encodes the transformation rules governing how causal structures shift across different latent world states. A single Meta-Causal Graph is composed of multiple causal subgraphs, each triggered by meta state, which is in the latent state space. Building on this representation, we introduce a \textbf{Causality-Seeking Agent} whose objectives are to (1) identify the meta states that trigger each subgraph, (2) discover the corresponding causal relationships by agent curiosity-driven intervention policy, and (3) iteratively refine the Meta-Causal Graph through ongoing curiosity-driven exploration and agent experiences. Experiments on both synthetic tasks and a challenging robot arm manipulation task demonstrate that our method robustly captures shifts in causal dynamics and generalizes effectively to previously unseen contexts.
title Curious Causality-Seeking Agents Learn Meta Causal World
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Applications
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23068