The Causally Emergent Alignment Hypothesis: Causal Emergence Aligns with and Predicts Final Reward in Reinforcement Learning Agents

A recent line of work measures causal emergence in reinforcement learning agents through Integrated Information Decomposition, reporting that $Φ_r$ grows with training and tracks reward improvement. For active inference, this raises the question of how reward-free predictive organization relates to such information-theoretic signatures. I test this within an active inference agent whose architecture separates a fast perception latent $z$ from a slow global latent $g$, where $g$ is driven by prediction error and structurally decoupled from policy gradients. In a reward-free environmental regime-switching protocol, $Φ_r$ concentrates in $g$; its aggregate magnitude is largely architectural and decreases with training. The substantive effect of learning becomes legible only at the atom-compositional level: decoupling flips sign from negative to positive and becomes regime-invariant under environmental change, while downward causation carries the regime-dependent adjustment. These results identify $g$ as the architectural locus of $Φ_r$-relevant temporal organization in an active inference agent, and argue against reading scalar $Φ_r$ as a direct index of learned integration.

Emergent misalignment (EM) is the surprising tendency of language models to become broadly misaligned after fine-tuning on narrowly misaligned examples. While EM has been extensively studied in the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) setting, evidence that it also arises from reinforcement learning (RL) is limited to large, closed-source models, leaving the phenomenon expensive to study and difficult to reproduce. We characterize EM from RL in small, off-the-shelf open-weight models along three axes. First, we show that rewarding narrow, overtly misaligned behavior produces substantially higher general-domain misalignment than sample-matched SFT. Second, we show that EM from RL can be induced by reward signals that could plausibly arise naturally, such as unpopular aesthetic preferences or poor rhetorical appeals. Third, we evaluate in-training mitigations developed for SFT-induced EM and find that they broadly transfer, with preventive steering with persona vectors, interleaving safety data and inoculation prompting all performing well.

Causal inference provides a set of principles and tools that allow one to combine data and knowledge about an environment to reason with questions of counterfactual nature, i.e., what would have happened had reality been different, even when no data of this unrealized reality is currently available. Reinforcement learning provides methods to learn a policy that optimizes a specific measure (e.g., reward, regret) when the agent is deployed in an environment and pursues an exploratory, trial-and-error approach. These two disciplines have evolved independently and with virtually no interaction between them. We note that they operate over different aspects of the same building block, counterfactual relations, which makes them umbilically connected. Based on these observations, novel learning opportunities arise when this connection is explicitly acknowledged and mathematized. To realize this potential, we note that any environment where the RL agent is deployed can be decomposed as a collection of autonomous mechanisms with different causal invariances, parsimoniously modeled as a structural causal model; any standard RL setting implicitly encodes such a model. This formalization allows us to put under a unifying treatment different modes of learning, including online, off-policy, and causal calculus learning, which appear unrelated in the literature. However, these modalities are not exhaustive: we introduce several natural and pervasive classes of learning settings that entail novel dimensions of analysis. Specifically, we introduce and discuss through causal lenses generalized policy learning, where to intervene, imitation learning, and counterfactual learning. These tasks lead to a broader view of counterfactual learning and suggest great potential for studying causal inference and reinforcement learning side by side, which we call causal reinforcement learning (CRL).