TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you are given the abstract of a research paper. Your task is to generate a summary of this abstract. Your summary should not be very short, but it's better if it's not more than 30 words.
PROBLEM: This paper investigates whether learning contingency-awareness and controllable aspects of an environment can lead to better exploration in reinforcement learning. To investigate this question, we consider an instantiation of this hypothesis evaluated on the Arcade Learning Element (ALE). In this study, we develop an attentive dynamics model (ADM) that discovers controllable elements of the observations, which are often associated with the location of the character in Atari games. The ADM is trained in a self-supervised fashion to predict the actions taken by the agent. The learned contingency information is used as a part of the state representation for exploration purposes. We demonstrate that combining actor-critic algorithm with count-based exploration using our representation achieves impressive results on a set of notoriously challenging Atari games due to sparse rewards. For example, we report a state-of-the-art score of >11,000 points on Montezuma's Revenge without using expert demonstrations, explicit high-level information (e.g., RAM states), or supervisory data. Our experiments confirm that contingency-awareness is indeed an extremely powerful concept for tackling exploration problems in reinforcement learning and opens up interesting research questions for further investigations.

SOLUTION: We investigate contingency-awareness and controllable aspects in exploration and achieve state-of-the-art performance on Montezuma's Revenge without expert demonstrations.

PROBLEM: Discovering causal structure among a set of variables is a fundamental problem in many empirical sciences. Traditional score-based casual discovery methods rely on various local heuristics to search for a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) according to a predefined score function. While these methods, e.g., greedy equivalence search, may have attractive results with infinite samples and certain model assumptions, they are less satisfactory in practice due to finite data and possible violation of assumptions. Motivated by recent advances in neural combinatorial optimization, we propose to use Reinforcement Learning (RL) to search for the DAG with the best scoring. Our encoder-decoder model takes observable data as input and generates graph adjacency matrices that are used to compute rewards. The reward incorporates both the predefined score function and two penalty terms for enforcing acyclicity. In contrast with typical RL applications where the goal is to learn a policy, we use RL as a search strategy and our final output would be the graph, among all graphs generated during training, that achieves the best reward. We conduct experiments on both synthetic and real datasets, and show that the proposed approach not only has an improved search ability but also allows for a flexible score function under the acyclicity constraint.

SOLUTION: We apply reinforcement learning to score-based causal discovery and achieve promising results on both synthetic and real datasets

PROBLEM: When training a deep neural network for supervised image classification, one can broadly distinguish between two types of latent features of images that will drive the classification of class Y. Following the notation of Gong et al. (2016), we can divide features broadly into the classes of (i) “core” or “conditionally invariant” features X^ci whose distribution P(X^ci | Y) does not change substantially across domains and (ii) “style” or “orthogonal” features X^orth whose distribution P(X^orth | Y) can change substantially across domains. These latter orthogonal features would generally include features such as position, rotation, image quality or brightness but also more complex ones like hair color or posture for images of persons. We try to guard against future adversarial domain shifts by ideally just using the “conditionally invariant” features for classification. In contrast to previous work, we assume that the domain itself is not observed and hence a latent variable. We can hence not directly see the distributional change of features across different domains. 

 We do assume, however, that we can sometimes observe a so-called identifier or ID variable. We might know, for example, that two images show the same person, with ID referring to the identity of the person. In data augmentation, we generate several images from the same original image, with ID referring to the relevant original image. The method requires only a small fraction of images to have an ID variable.

 We provide a causal framework for the problem by adding the ID variable to the model of Gong et al. (2016). However, we are interested in settings where we cannot observe the domain directly and we treat domain as a latent variable. If two or more samples share the same class and identifier, (Y, ID)=(y,i), then we treat those samples as counterfactuals under different style interventions on the orthogonal or style features. Using this grouping-by-ID approach, we regularize the network to provide near constant output across samples that share the same ID by penalizing with an appropriate graph Laplacian. This is shown to substantially improve performance in settings where domains change in terms of image quality, brightness, color changes, and more complex changes such as changes in movement and posture. We show links to questions of interpretability, fairness and transfer learning.

SOLUTION:
We propose counterfactual regularization to guard against adversarial domain shifts arising through shifts in the distribution of latent "style features" of images.