Online Causal Configuration for Networked Systems via Doubly Robust Steady-State Learning

Yuli Liu, Zhiheng Zhang

Measurement exploration reveals how interacting local controllers behave but can alter the steady-state regime a network operator seeks to optimize. Exploratory rewards may therefore fail to identify a configuration's no-exploration value: under full exploration, identical logged distributions can conceal different target values. Identification requires accounting for both action-law mismatch and shifts in the steady-state context distribution. We introduce CAUSAL-UCB, which selects configurations using optimistic bounds on target causal values. Its interference-aware clipped doubly robust evaluator produces predecision certificates separating statistical variation from calibrated identification, transport, and temporal-dependence errors. For any finite horizon and predetermined schedule of measurement-exploration rates $\{η_t\}$, we prove lower bounds of $Ω((1+\sum_tη_t)^{-1/2})$ on minimax inference error and $Ω(\sum_tη_t)$ on measurement-induced deployment loss in a stationary, potentially slow-mixing family. We bound regret under valid certificates and selected-information growth, and establish an anytime finite-sample certificate with a shared radius for estimation,…