Discovering What You Can Control: Interventional Boundary Discovery for Reinforcement Learning
When an RL agent's observations contain distractors driven by the same confounders as its true state, observational data alone cannot identify which dimensions the agent controls. In our benchmarks, even state-conditioned observational selectors can collapse when distractors mimic controllable state variables. We propose Interventional Boundary Discovery (IBD), which treats the agent's own action channel as a source of randomized interventions: randomizing actions implements an interventional contrast, and per-dimension two-sample tests with FDR correction produce a binary mask over observation dimensions. Across 12 continuous-control settings with up to 100 distractors, IBD matches oracl...
| Authors | Jiaxin Liu, Anzhe Cheng, Paul Bogdan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 18 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 September 2026 |
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