20 accepted papers
Enterprise AI Assistants are increasingly deployed in domains where accuracy is paramount, making each erroneous output a potentially significant incident. This paper presents a comprehensive framework for monitoring, benchmarking, and continuously improving such complex, multi-component systems und…
Human annotations play a crucial role in evaluating the performance of GenAI models. Two common challenges in practice, however, are missing annotations (the response variable of interest) and cluster dependence among human-AI interactions (e.g., questions asked by the same user may be highly correl…
Image Difference Captioning (IDC) aims to generate natural language descriptions that highlight subtle differences between two visually similar images. While recent advances leverage pre-trained vision-language models to align fine-grained visual differences with textual semantics, existing supervis
Large Language Models (LLMs) enable a new form of digital experimentation where treatments combine human and model-generated content in increasingly sophisticated ways. The main methodological challenge in this setting is representing these high-dimensional treatments without losing their semantic m…
While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly capable of handling longer contexts, recent work has demonstrated that they exhibit the _”lost in the middle”_ phenomenon (Liu et al., 2024) of unevenly attending to different parts of the provided context. This hinders their ability to cover diver…
Estimating causal effects from real-world relational data can be challenging when the underlying causal model and potential confounders are unknown. While several causal discovery algorithms exist for learning causal models with latent confounders from data, they assume that the data is independent
In many real-world causal inference applications, the primary outcomes (labels) are often partially missing, especially if they are expensive or difficult to collect. If the missingness depends on covariates (i.e., missingness is not completely at random), analyses based on fully observed samples al…
Recommendation strategies are typically evaluated by using previously logged data, employing off-policy evaluation methods to estimate their expected performance. However, for strategies that present users with slates of multiple items, the resulting combinatorial action space renders many of these…
Most real-world networks are noisy and incomplete samples from an unknown target distribution. Refining them by correcting corruptions or inferring unobserved regions typically improves downstream performance. Inspired by the impressive generative capabilities that have been used to correct corrupti…
The design and analysis of randomized experiments is fundamental to many areas, from the physical and social sciences to industrial settings. Regression adjustment is a popular technique to reduce the variance of estimates obtained from experiments, by utilizing information contained in auxiliary c…
In real-world phenomena which involve mutual influence or causal effects between interconnected units, equilibrium states are typically represented with cycles in graphical models. An expressive class of graphical models, relational causal models, can represent and reason about complex dynamic syste…
Online reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are often difficult to deploy in complex human-facing applications as they may learn slowly and have poor early performance. To address this, we introduce a practical algorithm for incorporating human insight to speed learning. Our algorithm, Constraint…
Independence testing plays a central role in statistical and causal inference from observational data. Standard independence tests assume that the data samples are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) but that assumption is violated in many real-world datasets and applications centered o…
We consider the experimental design problem in an online environment, an important practical task for reducing the variance of estimates in randomized experiments which allows for greater precision, and in turn, improved decision making. In this work, we present algorithms that build on recent advan…
Treatment effect estimation is a fundamental problem in causal inference. We focus on designing efficient randomized controlled trials, to accurately estimate the effect of some treatment on a population of $n$ individuals. In particular, we study \textit{sample-constrained treatment effect estimati…
We consider the problem of designing a randomized experiment on a source population to estimate the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) on a target population. We propose a novel approach which explicitly considers the target when designing the experiment on the source. Under the covariate shift assumpti…
In this work, we address the problem of balanced treatment assignment for experiments by considering an interpretation of the problem as optimization of a two-sample test between test and control units. Using this lens we provide an assignment algorithm that is optimal with respect to the minimum sp…
A commonly applied approach for estimating causal effects from observational data is to apply weights which render treatments independent of observed pre-treatment covariates. Recently emphasis has been placed on deriving balancing weights which explicitly target this independence condition. In this…
Estimation of importance sampling weights for off-policy evaluation of contextual bandits often results in imbalance—a mismatch between the desired and the actual distribution of state-action pairs after weighting. In this work we present balanced off-policy evaluation (B-OPE), a generic method for…
In many applied fields, researchers are ofteninterested in tailoring treatments to unit-levelcharacteristics in order to optimize an outcomeof interest. Methods for identifying andestimating treatment policies are the subjectof the dynamic treatment regime literature. Separately, in many settings th…