A Distribution Mapping Approach to Counterfactually Fair Reinforcement Learning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08743v1
• Date: Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:42:47 GMT
• Title: A Distribution Mapping Approach to Counterfactually Fair Reinforcement Learning
• Abstract summary: Reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to optimize sequential decisions to maximize population-level benefits over time.<n>Counterfactual fairness (CF) offers a promising framework to address this problem based on causal reasoning.<n>This paper develops a data preprocessing algorithm that, when used in tandem with policy learning, enables CF in RL.
• Score: 13.577985538159155
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to optimize sequential decisions to maximize population-level benefits over time. However, when deployed in high-stakes settings such as healthcare, RL decisions might systematically restrict some subpopulation's access to valuable services in a manner contrary to the values and goals of stakeholders. Counterfactual fairness (CF) offers a promising framework to address this problem based on causal reasoning. This paper develops a data preprocessing algorithm that, when used in tandem with policy learning, enables CF in RL. Our algorithm relies on a novel quantile distribution mapping method for sequentially estimating the counterfactual states and rewards in the data preprocessing step, subsuming common additivity assumptions used for counterfactual prediction as a special case. We theoretically prove that the per-step level of counterfactual unfairness and infinite-horizon suboptimality gap can be bounded under mild regularity conditions. We also empirically test our algorithm in numerical experiments as well as in application to a real-world interventional digital health dataset.

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