Keywords? I've looked through Wikipedia and the table of contents from my ML textbook, but I haven't found the right term to research yet. "Learn a causal structure from the data and model the part of it that appears to narrow the future" would in fact be how to build a value-learner, but... yeah.

EDIT: One of my profs from undergrad published a paper last year about causal-structure. The question is how useful it is for universal AI applications. Joshua Tenenbaum tackled it from the cog-sci angle in 2011, but again, I'm not sure how to transfer it over to the UAI angle. I was searching for "learning causal structure from data" -- herp, derp.