Learning Causal States Under Partial Observability and Perturbation

A critical challenge for reinforcement learning (RL) is making decisions based on incomplete and noisy observations, especially in perturbed and partially observable Markov decision processes (P2OMDPs). Existing methods fail to mitigate perturbations while addressing partial observability. We propose textitCausal State Representation under Asynchronous Diffusion Model (CaDiff), a framework that enhances any RL algorithm by uncovering the underlying causal structure of P2OMDPs. This is achieved by incorporating a novel asynchronous diffusion model (ADM) and a new bisimulation metric. ADM enables forward and reverse processes with different numbers of steps, thus interpreting the perturbation of P2OMDP as part of the noise suppressed through diffusion. The bisimulation metric quantifies the similarity between partially observable environments and their causal counterparts. Moreover, we establish the theoretical guarantee of CaDiff by deriving an upper bound for the value function approximation errors between perturbed observations and denoised causal states, reflecting a principled trade-off between approximation errors of reward and transition-model. Experiments on Roboschool tasks show that CaDiff enhances returns by at least 14.18% compared to baselines. CaDiff is the first framework that approximates causal states using diffusion models with both theoretical rigor and practicality.