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  4. Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with Targeted Causal Interventions
 
conference paper

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with Targeted Causal Interventions

Khorasani, Mohammadsadegh  
•
Salehkaleybar, Saber  
•
Kiyavash, Negar  
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July 15, 2025
Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning
42nd International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2025

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) improves the efficiency of long-horizon reinforcement-learning tasks with sparse rewards by decomposing the task into a hierarchy of subgoals. The main challenge of HRL is efficient discovery of the hierarchical structure among subgoals and utilizing this structure to achieve the final goal. We address this challenge by modeling the subgoal structure as a causal graph and propose a causal discovery algorithm to learn it. Additionally, rather than intervening on the subgoals at random during exploration, we harness the discovered causal model to prioritize subgoal interventions based on their importance in attaining the final goal. These targeted interventions result in a significantly more efficient policy in terms of the training cost. Unlike previous work on causal HRL, which lacked theoretical analysis, we provide a formal analysis of the problem. Specifically, for tree structures and, for a variant of Erdős-Rényi random graphs, our approach results in remarkable improvements. Our experimental results on HRL tasks also illustrate that our proposed framework outperforms existing work in terms of training cost.

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Type
conference paper
Author(s)
Khorasani, Mohammadsadegh  

EPFL

Salehkaleybar, Saber  

LIACS

Kiyavash, Negar  

EPFL

Grossglauser, Matthias  

EPFL

Date Issued

2025-07-15

Published in
Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning
Series title/Series vol.

PMLR; 267

ISSN (of the series)

2640-3498

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
BAN  
INDY1  
Event nameEvent acronymEvent placeEvent date
42nd International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2025

ICML25

Vancouver

2025-07-13 - 2025-07-19

Available on Infoscience
September 30, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/254443
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