- Kosoy, Eliza;
- Chan, David M;
- Liu, Adrian;
- Collins, Jasmine;
- Hamrick, Jessica;
- Huang, Sandy Han;
- Ke, Nan Rosemary;
- Reagan, Emily Rose;
- Canny, John;
- Gopnik, Alison
Recent work in machine learning and cognitive science has
suggested that understanding causal information is essential
to the development of intelligence. One of the key challenges
for current machine learning algorithms is modeling and understanding
causal overhypotheses: transferable abstract hypotheses
about sets of causal relationships. In contrast, even
young children spontaneously learn causal overhypotheses, and
use these to guide their exploration or to generalize to new
situations. This has been demonstrated in a variety of cognitive
science experiments using the “blicket detector” environment.
We present a causal learning benchmark adapting the “blicket"
environment for machine learning agents and evaluate a range
of state-of-the-art methods in this environment. We find that although
most agents have no problem learning causal structures
seen during training, they are unable to learn causal overhypotheses
from these experiences, and thus cannot generalize to
new settings.