credit

Definition

Not money or acknowledgement but attribution of responsibility for an outcome. The word lives almost entirely inside credit assignment: when a reward arrives only at the end of a long trajectory, which of the many earlier actions actually caused it, and by how much? This is one of the core difficulties of reinforcement learning, and it gets harder the more delayed and sparse the reward signal becomes.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Deep-Dive: ABSeeker — Training Long-Horizon Search Agents by Grading Each Step Backward from the AnswerABSeeker: Training Long-Horizon Search Agents via Answer-Backtracked Credit Assignment