ResearchTrend.AI
  • Papers
  • Communities
  • Events
  • Blog
  • Pricing
Papers
Communities
Social Events
Terms and Conditions
Pricing
Parameter LabParameter LabTwitterGitHubLinkedInBlueskyYoutube

© 2025 ResearchTrend.AI, All rights reserved.

  1. Home
  2. Papers
  3. 2310.11334
19
0

Agent-Specific Effects: A Causal Effect Propagation Analysis in Multi-Agent MDPs

17 October 2023
Stelios Triantafyllou
A. Sukovic
Debmalya Mandal
Goran Radanović
ArXivPDFHTML
Abstract

Establishing causal relationships between actions and outcomes is fundamental for accountable multi-agent decision-making. However, interpreting and quantifying agents' contributions to such relationships pose significant challenges. These challenges are particularly prominent in the context of multi-agent sequential decision-making, where the causal effect of an agent's action on the outcome depends on how other agents respond to that action. In this paper, our objective is to present a systematic approach for attributing the causal effects of agents' actions to the influence they exert on other agents. Focusing on multi-agent Markov decision processes, we introduce agent-specific effects (ASE), a novel causal quantity that measures the effect of an agent's action on the outcome that propagates through other agents. We then turn to the counterfactual counterpart of ASE (cf-ASE), provide a sufficient set of conditions for identifying cf-ASE, and propose a practical sampling-based algorithm for estimating it. Finally, we experimentally evaluate the utility of cf-ASE through a simulation-based testbed, which includes a sepsis management environment.

View on arXiv
Comments on this paper