gonzalez-soto2019reinforcement: Reinforcement Learning is not a Causal problem

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tags
Causality
source
https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.07617
authors
Gonzalez-Soto, Mauricio, & Espina, F. O.
year
2019

This paper argues against confusing the language of reinforcement learning and causal inference problems. They argue the underlying mathematical language and structure are fundamentally incompatible. The argument comes down to what the authors presuppose the RL problem is about and only looks at RL from the perspective of model-free learning.

I won’t go into detail about this paper. While some of the ideas may be ok, the fundamental flaw is not considering model-based RL as synonymous w/ RL and the problem of learning about the world as not an RL problem (which is what causal reasoning/inference is primarily concerned with).

References