  It has been postulated that a good representation is one that disentangles
the underlying explanatory factors of variation. However, it remains an open
question what kind of training framework could potentially achieve that.
Whereas most previous work focuses on the static setting (e.g., with images),
we postulate that some of the causal factors could be discovered if the learner
is allowed to interact with its environment. The agent can experiment with
different actions and observe their effects. More specifically, we hypothesize
that some of these factors correspond to aspects of the environment which are
independently controllable, i.e., that there exists a policy and a learnable
feature for each such aspect of the environment, such that this policy can
yield changes in that feature with minimal changes to other features that
explain the statistical variations in the observed data. We propose a specific
objective function to find such factors and verify experimentally that it can
indeed disentangle independently controllable aspects of the environment
without any extrinsic reward signal.
