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Stream/Area:
-
Subject:
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Paper ID:
IJSREM67301
Volume:
10 |
9 |
Sep 2026
Pages:
1-20
Publication Frequency:
Monthly (12 issues per year)
License:International Journal of Scientific Research in Engineering and Management follows the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) License, allowing free use and distribution with proper attribution.

Independent
University of Mary Hardin Baylor
Independent
Bharathidasan University
Independent
JNTU
Independent
University of Illinois Springfield
Independent
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Adaptive question selection is an emerging capability in human–AI decision systems where an agent must determine what information to acquire before making a decision. Existing approaches commonly use reinforcement learning (RL), information gain, or post-hoc explainability methods such as SHAP and LIME to identify important variables. However, these methods primarily capture predictive associations and do not establish whether the information requested by an AI was causally necessary for its decision. This paper proposes Causal Explainable Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Question Selection (CERL-AQS), a framework integrating Bayesian belief-state estimation, structural causal models, causal reinforcement learning, and counterfactual reasoning. The proposed approach evaluates the causal value of candidate questions by estimating how obtaining or withholding specific information changes the probability of downstream decisions. A multi-objective RL policy jointly optimizes decision accuracy, causal information value, questioning cost, user burden, and explanation validity. The framework generates counterfactual explanations describing how the final decision would change if the requested information had not been obtained. The proposed methodology is designed to be evaluated against conventional RL, information-gain, SHAP-based, and counterfactual baselines using decision accuracy, question efficiency, causal fidelity, counterfactual validity, robustness, and human explanation comprehension. The study aims to advance adaptive AI from associational feature attribution toward causally grounded, decision-relevant explanations.
KEYWORDS
This study proposes Causal Explainable Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Question Selection (CERL-AQS) to address the limitations of association-based explanation in adaptive AI. By integrating causal question value and counterfactual reasoning into RL, the framework seeks to explain not only why a question was asked, but also what would have happened without its information. Future research will focus on real-world human–AI experiments, automated causal-graph discovery, uncertainty-aware causal explanations, fairness-aware question selection, multimodal information acquisition, and scalable causal RL algorithms. Further work will also investigate online learning and deployment under distribution shift. These directions can advance CERL-AQS toward reliable, transparent, and practically deployable human-centered AI decision systems.
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Publication Date
9/16/2026
Peer Review Type
Double-Blind Peer Review
Review Rounds: 2
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