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Discovering Agents

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arxiv 2208.08345 v2 pith:MZ7XLZVN submitted 2022-08-17 cs.AI cs.LG

Discovering Agents

classification cs.AI cs.LG
keywords agentscausaldiscoveringfirstmodellingmodelssafetysystems
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Causal models of agents have been used to analyse the safety aspects of machine learning systems. But identifying agents is non-trivial -- often the causal model is just assumed by the modeler without much justification -- and modelling failures can lead to mistakes in the safety analysis. This paper proposes the first formal causal definition of agents -- roughly that agents are systems that would adapt their policy if their actions influenced the world in a different way. From this we derive the first causal discovery algorithm for discovering agents from empirical data, and give algorithms for translating between causal models and game-theoretic influence diagrams. We demonstrate our approach by resolving some previous confusions caused by incorrect causal modelling of agents.

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Cited by 2 Pith papers

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  1. Promptbreeder: Self-Referential Self-Improvement Via Prompt Evolution

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    Promptbreeder evolves both task prompts and the mutation prompts that improve them using LLMs, outperforming Chain-of-Thought and Plan-and-Solve on arithmetic and commonsense reasoning benchmarks.

  2. Causal Agent Replay: Counterfactual Attribution for LLM-Agent Failures

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Causal Agent Replay attributes LLM agent failures via do-interventions on step-level structural causal models, using contrastive estimators and Monte-Carlo Shapley values validated on synthetic ground truth.