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Mehdi Dastani

8 accepted papers

2025

Temporal Causal Reasoning with (Non-Recursive) Structural Equation Models

AAAI 2025technical

Structural equation models (SEM) are a standard approach to representing causal dependencies between variables. In this paper we propose a new interpretation of existing formalisms in the field of Actual Causality in which SEM's are viewed as mechanisms transforming the dynamics of exogenous variabl…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

The Causal Information Bottleneck and Optimal Causal Variable Abstractions

UAI 2025

To effectively study complex causal systems, it is often useful to construct abstractions of parts of the system by discarding irrelevant details while preserving key features. The Information Bottleneck (IB) method is a widely used approach to construct variable abstractions by compressing random v

2024

Bootstrapped Policy Learning for Task-oriented Dialogue through Goal Shaping

EMNLP 2024main

Reinforcement learning shows promise in optimizing dialogue policies, but addressing the challenge of reward sparsity remains crucial. While curriculum learning offers a practical solution by strategically training policies from simple to complex, it hinges on the assumption of a gradual increase in…

2024

Pure-Past Action Masking

AAAI 2024technical

We present Pure-Past Action Masking (PPAM), a lightweight approach to action masking for safe reinforcement learning. In PPAM, actions are disallowed (“masked”) according to specifications expressed in Pure-Past Linear Temporal Logic (PPLTL). PPAM can enforce non-Markovian constraints, i.e., constra…

2024

Revising Beliefs and Intentions in Stochastic Environments

IJCAI 2024poster

The development of autonomous agents operating in dynamic and stochastic environments requires theories and models of how beliefs and intentions are revised while taking their interplay into account. In this paper, we initiate the study of belief and intention revision in stochastic environments, wh…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

Data-Driven Revision of Conditional Norms in Multi-Agent Systems (Extended Abstract)

IJCAI 2023poster

In multi-agent systems, norm enforcement is a mechanism for steering the behavior of individual agents in order to achieve desired system-level objectives. Due to the dynamics of multi-agent systems, however, it is hard to design norms that guarantee the achievement of the objectives in every operat…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

Probabilistic Temporal Logic for Reasoning about Bounded Policies

IJCAI 2023poster

To build a theory of intention revision for agents operating in stochastic environments, we need a logic in which we can explicitly reason about their decision-making policies and those policies' uncertain outcomes. Towards this end, we propose PLBP, a novel probabilistic temporal logic for Markov D…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar