Agents Robust to Distribution Shifts Learn Causal World Models Even Under Mediation

In this work, we prove that agents capable of adapting to distribution shifts must have learned the causal model of their environment even in the presence of mediation. This term describes situations where an agent’s actions affect its environment, a dynamic common to most real-world settings. For example, a robot in an industrial plant might interact with tools, move through space, and transform products to complete its task. We introduce an algorithm for eliciting causal knowledge from robust agents using optimal policy oracles, with the flexibility to incorporate prior causal knowledge. We further demonstrate its effectiveness in mediated single-agent scenarios and multi-agent environments. We identify conditions under which the presence of a single robust agent is sufficient to recover the full causal model and derive optimal policies for other agents in the same environment. Finally, we show how to apply these results to sequential decision-making tasks modeled as Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs).