Learning Rules from Rewards

Humans can flexibly generalize knowledge across domains by leveraging structured relational representations. While prior research has shown how such representations support analogical reasoning, less is known about how they are recruited to guide adaptive behavior. We address this gap by introducing the Relational Regression Tree Learner (RRTL), a model that incrementally builds policies over structured relational inputs by selecting task-relevant relations during the learning process. RRTL is grounded in the framework of relational reinforcement learning but diverges from traditional approaches by focusing on ground (i.e., non-variabilized) rules that refer to specific object configurations. Across three Atari games of increasing relational complexity (Breakout, Pong, Demon Attack), the model learns to act effectively by identifying a small set of relevant relations from a broad pool of candidate relations. A comparative version of the model, which partitions the state space using relative magnitude values (e.g., "more", "same", "less"), showed more robust learning than a version using logical (binary) splits. These results provide a proof of principle that reinforcement signals can guide the selection of structured representations, offering a computational framework for understanding how relational knowledge is learned and deployed in adaptive behavior.