Beyond Temporal Proximity: Explanatory World Models for Credit Assignment in Reinforcement Learning
arXiv:2610.13504v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative Recommenders increasingly use Reinforcement Learning (RL) to optimize outcomes that may appear hundreds or thousands of interactions after a decision. Standard RL propagates reward according to temporal proximity rather than explicit relevance, attenuating the signal assigned to distant but important actions and creating a source of sample inefficiency. We introduce Explanatory World Models (EWM), an attribution framework that uses ex…