On the Sufficiency of Rehearsal in Avoiding Undesired Future

When a model predicts an undesired outcome, deciding how to avoid it naturally calls for identifying causal relations between actions and outcomes. Prior studies suggest that effective actions can often be chosen by judging their influence on desired outcomes through rehearsal in a hypothetical world, even without faithfully modeling the underlying causal mechanisms. This raises a foundational question: whether rehearsal generally suffices for decision-making without identifying those mechanisms, and if so, what information it requires beyond vanilla prediction. We address this by formalizing the influence information required for decision-making with structural equation models and showing that this information does not in general entail complete causal identification. We further characterize the conditions under which the desired influence is discernible from observational data and develop a principled procedure for determining it under partial structural knowledge. Our theoretical and empirical results support the feasibility of rehearsal in avoiding undesired outcomes with limited structural knowledge.