mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

InferNet for Delayed Reinforcement Tasks: Addressing the Temporal Credit Assignment Problem

arXiv 2105.00568 ↗First posted 2 May 2021cs.LGcited by 2

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Abstract (arXiv)

The temporal Credit Assignment Problem (CAP) is a well-known and challenging task in AI. While Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially Deep RL, works well when immediate rewards are available, it can fail when only delayed rewards are available or when the reward function is noisy. In this work, we propose delegating the CAP to a Neural Network-based algorithm named InferNet that explicitly learns to infer the immediate rewards from the delayed rewards. The effectiveness of InferNet was evaluated on two online RL tasks: a simple GridWorld and 40 Atari games; and two offline RL tasks: GridWorld and a real-life Sepsis treatment task. For all tasks, the effectiveness of using the InferNet inferred rewards is compared against the immediate and the delayed rewards with two settings: with noisy rewards and without noise. Overall, our results show that the effectiveness of InferNet is robust against noisy reward functions and is an effective add-on mechanism for solving temporal CAP in a wide range of RL tasks, from classic RL simulation environments to a real-world RL problem and for both online and offline learning.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 4 of its 28 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 May 2021.

Builds on

4 of 28 references.

References · 4

  1. 2019Dota 2 with Large Scale Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,084
  2. 2017Deep Reinforcement Learning for Sepsis Treatmentcited by 71
  3. 2019Learning to solve the credit assignment problemcited by 27
  4. 2018Conducting Credit Assignment by Aligning Local Representationscited by 12

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Citing papers per year: 2023: 2.

2 papers.

  1. 2023Would I have gotten that reward? Long-term credit assignment by counterfactual contribution analysiscited by 10
  2. 2023HOPE: Human-Centric Off-Policy Evaluation for E-Learning and Healthcarecited by 5

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026From Reasoning to Agentic: Credit Assignment in Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models
  2. 2024Latent Reward: LLM-Empowered Credit Assignment in Episodic Reinforcement Learning
  3. 2024Beyond Simple Sum of Delayed Rewards: Non-Markovian Reward Modeling for Reinforcement Learning
  4. 2026Rewarding Beliefs, Not Actions: Consistency-Guided Credit Assignment for Long-Horizon Agents
  5. 2024In-Context Decision Transformer: Reinforcement Learning via Hierarchical Chain-of-Thought
  6. 2026TRACE: Turn-level Reward Assignment via Credit Estimation for Long-Horizon Agents
  7. 2026MindGames Arena Generalization Track: In2AI Solution with Delayed Per-Step Reward Attribution
  8. 2026DelTA: Discriminative Token Credit Assignment for Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards