Researcher profile

Chenran Zhao

Chenran Zhao contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate

Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence

Trust snapshot

Quick read

Trust 13 - UnverifiedVerification L1Unclaimed author

2works

0followers

2topics

4close collaborators

Actions

Decide how to stay connected

Follow researcher0

Claiming links this public author record to a researcher profile and unlocks direct collaboration workflows.

Direct collaboration

Open a focused conversation when the fit is right

Claim this author entity first to unlock direct invitations.

Inspect adjacent work, topics, institutions and collaborators without jumping out to a separate graph page.

Building this graph slice

BZPEER is loading the nearby papers, people, topics and institutions for this page.

preprint2026arXiv

Delay-Empowered Causal Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

Many real-world tasks involve delayed effects, where the outcomes of actions emerge after varying time lags. Existing delay-aware reinforcement learning methods often rely on state augmentation, prior knowledge of delay distributions, or access to non-delayed data, limiting their generalization. Hierarchical reinforcement learning, by contrast, inherently offers advantages in handling delays due to its hierarchical structure, yet existing methods are restricted to fixed delays. To address these limitations, we propose Delay-Empowered Causal Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (DECHRL). DECHRL explicitly models both the causal structure of state transitions and their associated stochastic delay distributions. These are then incorporated into a delay-aware empowerment objective that drives proactive exploration toward highly controllable states, thereby improving performance under temporal uncertainty. We evaluate DECHRL in modified 2D-Minecraft and MiniGrid environments featuring stochastic delays. Experimental results show that DECHRL effectively models temporal delays and significantly outperforms baselines in decision-making under temporal uncertainty.

preprint2026arXiv

Transferable Delay-Aware Reinforcement Learning via Implicit Causal Graph Modeling

Random delays weaken the temporal correspondence between actions and subsequent state feedback, making it difficult for agents to identify the true propagation process of action effects. In cross-task scenarios, changes in task objectives and reward formulations further reduce the reusability of previously acquired task knowledge. To address this problem, this paper proposes a transferable delay-aware reinforcement learning method based on implicit causal graph modeling. The proposed method uses a field-node encoder to represent high-dimensional observations as latent states with node-level semantics, and employs a message-passing mechanism to characterize dynamic causal dependencies among nodes, thereby learning transferable structured representations and environment dynamics knowledge. On this basis, imagination-driven behavior learning and planning are incorporated to optimize policies in the latent space, enabling cross-task knowledge transfer and rapid adaptation. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms baseline methods on DMC continuous control tasks with random delays. Cross-task transfer experiments further demonstrate that the learned structured representations and dynamics knowledge can be effectively transferred to new tasks and significantly accelerate policy adaptation.

Institution

Affiliation not imported yet

This author record came from a source that does not expose affiliation metadata. Once the author claims the profile or we enrich the record from another provider, this section will link to the concrete institution.

Topic footprint