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David Watson

7 accepted papers

2025

Abstract Counterfactuals for Language Model Agents

NeurIPS 2025poster

Counterfactual inference is a powerful tool for analysing and evaluating autonomous agents, but its application to language model (LM) agents remains challenging. Existing work on counterfactuals in LMs has primarily focused on token-level counterfactuals, which are often inadequate for LM agents du…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

BudgetIV: Optimal Partial Identification of Causal Effects with Mostly Invalid Instruments

AISTATS 2025poster

Instrumental variables (IVs) are widely used to estimate causal effects in the presence of unobserved confounding between an exposure $X$ and outcome $Y$. An IV must affect $Y$ exclusively through $X$ and be unconfounded with $Y$. We present a framework for relaxing these assumptions with tuneable a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Explaining Predictive Uncertainty with Information Theoretic Shapley Values

NeurIPS 2023poster

Researchers in explainable artificial intelligence have developed numerous methods for helping users understand the predictions of complex supervised learning models. By contrast, explaining the $\textit{uncertainty}$ of model outputs has received relatively little attention. We adapt the popular Sh…

2023

Intervention Generalization: A View from Factor Graph Models

NeurIPS 2023poster

One of the goals of causal inference is to generalize from past experiments and observational data to novel conditions. While it is in principle possible to eventually learn a mapping from a novel experimental condition to an outcome of interest, provided a sufficient variety of experiments is avail…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2021

Operationalizing Complex Causes: A Pragmatic View of Mediation

ICML 2021spotlight

We examine the problem of causal response estimation for complex objects (e.g., text, images, genomics). In this setting, classical \emph{atomic} interventions are often not available (e.g., changes to characters, pixels, DNA base-pairs). Instead, we only have access to indirect or \emph{crude} inte…