{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/additive-causal-bandits-with-unknown-graph","title":"Additive Causal Bandits with Unknown Graph","arxiv_id":"2306.07858","date":"2023-06-13","proceeding":null,"authors":["Alan Malek","Virginia Aglietti","Silvia Chiappa"],"abstract":"We explore algorithms to select actions in the causal bandit setting where the learner can choose to intervene on a set of random variables related by a causal graph, and the learner sequentially chooses interventions and observes a sample from the interventional distribution. The learner's goal is to quickly find the intervention, among all interventions on observable variables, that maximizes the expectation of an outcome variable. We depart from previous literature by assuming no knowledge of the causal graph except that latent confounders between the outcome and its ancestors are not present. We first show that the unknown graph problem can be exponentially hard in the parents of the outcome. To remedy this, we adopt an additional additive assumption on the outcome which allows us to solve the problem by casting it as an additive combinatorial linear bandit problem with full-bandit feedback. We propose a novel action-elimination algorithm for this setting, show how to apply this algorithm to the causal bandit problem, provide sample complexity bounds, and empirically validate our findings on a suite of randomly generated causal models, effectively showing that one does not need to explicitly learn the parents of the outcome to identify the best intervention.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07858v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.07858v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"additive-causal-bandits-with-unknown-graph","repo_url":"https://github.com/deepmind/additive_cbug","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2306.07858","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2306.07858","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2306.07858"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/deepmind/additive_cbug","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"summary":{"unverified":5},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":5,"ran":0,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"2ca91587c4f5c0f3","entry":"form_data_matrix","repo":"deepmind/additive_cbug","repo_kind":"official","path":"cbug/utils.py","file_url":"https://github.com/deepmind/additive_cbug/blob/HEAD/cbug/utils.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"2ca91587c4f5c0f3"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"34235329f4033eae","entry":"get_name_to_idx","repo":"deepmind/additive_cbug","repo_kind":"official","path":"cbug/utils.py","file_url":"https://github.com/deepmind/additive_cbug/blob/HEAD/cbug/utils.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"34235329f4033eae"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"98e8488e8114279a","entry":"interval_intersection","repo":"deepmind/additive_cbug","repo_kind":"official","path":"cbug/utils.py","file_url":"https://github.com/deepmind/additive_cbug/blob/HEAD/cbug/utils.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"98e8488e8114279a"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"6b5c34578345af57","entry":"reduce_actions","repo":"deepmind/additive_cbug","repo_kind":"official","path":"cbug/base.py","file_url":"https://github.com/deepmind/additive_cbug/blob/HEAD/cbug/base.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"6b5c34578345af57"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"70d4008b50b2ea75","entry":"xy_optimal_design","repo":"deepmind/additive_cbug","repo_kind":"official","path":"cbug/base.py","file_url":"https://github.com/deepmind/additive_cbug/blob/HEAD/cbug/base.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"70d4008b50b2ea75"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}