AAAI 2026technical0 citations

POLICYGRID: Causal Discovery for Adaptive Policy Optimization in Embodied Agents (Student Abstract)

Taqiya Ehsan, Shuren Xia, Jorge Ortiz

Abstract

Embodied agents must reason causally, as correlation-based models fail under intervention and distribution shift. This challenge arises in domains like robotics and cyber-physical systems, where agents balance efficiency and comfort under uncertainty. We introduce POLICYGRID, unifying causal discovery and control by treating each action as both decision and experiment. Leveraging constraint-based search, neural causal models, and language model priors with interventional validation, POLICYGRID yields adaptive, interpretable policies. Across synthetic, real-world, and live deployments, it achieves superior causal recovery (F1 = 0.89) and 2.8× better multi-objective performance than correlation-based baselines, demonstrating safe, generalizable decision-making.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{aaai2026_policygridcausal,
  title = {POLICYGRID: Causal Discovery for Adaptive Policy Optimization in Embodied Agents (Student Abstract)},
  author = {Taqiya Ehsan and Shuren Xia and Jorge Ortiz},
  booktitle = {AAAI 2026},
  year = {2026}
}