Certified Policy Optimisation for Nested Causal Bandits via PAC-Bayes Risk 文章

ArXiv CS.AI2026-05-29NEWSen作者: Tim Woydt, Paul-David Zuercher

摘要

arXiv:2605.29788v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Critical sequential decisions are rarely single-timescale: a strategic decision causally shapes the context in which every subsequent tactical choice is made; standard bandit and reinforcement-learning theory does not capture this causal coupling between timescales. We formalise the problem class as Nested Contextual Causal Bandits (NCCBs), a hierarchical SCM where each level's action sets the next level's context distribution, and propose Nested Causal Thompson Sampling (NCTS), which draws one mechanism-factorised belief per episode and acts recursively under it. Our main theoretical result is a causal PAC-Bayesian excess-risk bound that certifies any candidate deployment policy from historic data alone, off-policy and anytime, answering the deployment question: can we trust this agent here, and at what risk?