Curious Causality-Seeking Agents Learn Meta Causal World

When building a world model, a common assumption is that the environment has a single, unchanging underlying causal rule, like applying Newton's laws to every situation. However, in truly open-ended environments, the apparent causal mechanism may drift over time because the agent continually encounters novel contexts and operates within a limited observational window. This brings about a problem that, when building a world model, even subtle shifts in policy or environment states can alter the very observed causal mechanisms.

In this work, we introduce the Meta-Causal Graph as world models for open-ended environments, a minimal unified representation that efficiently encodes the transformation rules governing how causal structures shift across different latent world states. A single Meta-Causal Graph is composed of multiple causal subgraphs, each triggered by meta state, which is in the latent state space.

Building on this representation, we introduce a Causality-Seeking Agent whose objectives are to

Experiments on both synthetic tasks and a challenging robot arm manipulation task demonstrate that our method robustly captures shifts in causal dynamics and generalizes effectively to previously unseen contexts.