Curious Causality-Seeking Agents Learn Meta Causal World
This addresses the challenge of modeling dynamic causal environments for agents, particularly in robotics, but is incremental as it builds on existing curiosity-driven and causal representation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of building world models when causal mechanisms appear to drift due to narrow observational windows, by introducing a Meta-Causal Graph representation and a Causality-Seeking Agent that identifies meta states and discovers causal relationships through curiosity-driven interventions, demonstrating robust capture of causal shifts and effective generalization in synthetic and robot arm tasks.
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.