75 accepted papers
Expressive policies based on flow-matching have been successfully applied in reinforcement learning (RL) more recently due to their ability to model complex action distributions from offline data. These algorithms build on standard policy gradients, which assume that there is no unmeasured confoundi…
An artificial intelligence must have a model of its environment that is *causal*, supporting reasoning about interventions and counterfactuals, and also *combinatorial*, supporting generalization to unseen combinations of objects. In this work, we formally study when and how such a model can be lear…
Graphical models have been widely used as parsimonious encoders of assumptions of the underlying causal system and provide a basis for causal inferences. Models encoding stronger constraints tend to require higher expressive power, which are also harder, and sometimes impossible to empirically falsi…
Reward shaping has been demonstrated to be an effective technique for accelerating the learning process of reinforcement learning (RL) agents. While successful in empirical applications, the design of a good shaping function is less well understood in principle and thus often relies on domain expert…
The study of causal abstractions bridges two integral components of human intelligence: the ability to determine cause and effect, and the ability to interpret complex patterns into abstract concepts. Formally, causal abstraction frameworks define connections between complicated low-level causal mod…
Causal discovery methods are powerful tools for uncovering the structure of relationships among variables, yet they face significant challenges in scalability and interpretability, especially in high-dimensional settings. In many domains, researchers are not only interested in causal links between i…
A unifying theme in Artificial Intelligence is learning an effective policy to control an agent in an unknown environment in order to optimize a certain performance measure. Off-policy methods can significantly improve sample efficiency during training, since they allow an agent to learn from observ
A key task in Artificial Intelligence is learning effective policies for controlling agents in unknown environments to optimize performance measures. Off-policy learning methods, like Q-learning, allow learners to make optimal decisions based on past experiences. This paper studies off-policy learni…
Graphical models have been widely used as parsimonious encoders of constraints of the underlying probability models. When organized in a structured way, these models can facilitate the derivation of non-trivial constraints, the inference of quantities of interest, and the optimization of their estim…
Reasoning with counterfactuals is one of the hallmarks of human cognition, involved in various tasks such as explanation, credit assignment, blame, and responsibility. Counterfactual quantities that are not identifiable in the general non-parametric case may be identified under shape constraints on…
The process of editing an image can be naturally modeled as evaluating a counterfactual query: “What would an image look like if a particular feature had changed?” While recent advances in text-guided image editing leverage powerful pre-trained models to produce visually appealing images, they ofte…
It is commonly believed that, in a real-world environment, samples can only be drawn from observational and interventional distributions, corresponding to Layers 1 and 2 of the *Pearl Causal Hierarchy*. Layer 3, representing counterfactual distributions, is believed to be inaccessible by definition.…
With the widespread adoption of AI systems, many of the decisions once made by humans are now delegated to automated systems. Recent works in the literature demonstrate that these automated systems, when used in socially sensitive domains, may exhibit discriminatory behavior based on sensitive chara…
Understanding the predictions made by deep learning models remains a central challenge, especially in high-stakes applications. A promising approach is to equip models with the ability to answer counterfactual questions -- hypothetical ``what if?'' scenarios that go beyond the observed data and prov…
Greedy Equivalence Search (GES) is a classic score-based algorithm for causal discovery from observational data. In the sample limit, it recovers the Markov equivalence class of graphs that describe the data. Still, it faces two challenges in practice: computational cost and finite-sample accuracy.…
In decision-making processes, an intelligent agent with causal knowledge can optimize action spaces to avoid unnecessary exploration. A *structural causal bandit* framework provides guidance on how to prune actions that are unable to maximize reward by leveraging prior knowledge of the underlying ca…
Testing a hypothesized causal model against observational data is a key prerequisite for many causal inference tasks. A natural approach is to test whether the conditional independence relations (CIs) assumed in the model hold in the data. While a model can assume exponentially many CIs (with respec…
Imitation learning enables an agent to learn from expert demonstrations when the performance measure is unknown and the reward signal is not specified. Standard imitation methods do not generally apply when the learner and the expert's sensory capabilities mismatch and demonstrations are contaminate…
A pervasive challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the ``curse of dimensionality'' which is the exponential growth in the state-action space when optimizing a high-dimensional target task. The framework of curriculum learning trains the agent in a curriculum composed of a sequence of related an…
Counterfactual image editing is a challenging task within generative AI. The current literature on the topic focuses primarily on changing individual features while being silent about the causal relationships between features, which are present in the real world. In this paper, we first formalize th…
Considering various data modalities, such as images, videos, and text, humans perform causal reasoning using high-level causal variables, as opposed to operating at the low, pixel level from which the data comes. In practice, most causal reasoning methods assume that the data is described as granul…
As society increasingly relies on AI-based tools for decision-making in socially sensitive domains, investigating fairness and equity of such automated systems has become a critical field of inquiry. Most of the literature in fair machine learning focuses on defining and achieving fairness criteria…
The ability of humans to understand the world in terms of cause and effect relationships, as well as their ability to compress information into abstract concepts, are two hallmark features of human intelligence. These two topics have been studied in tandem under the theory of causal abstractions, bu…
A fundamental task in AI is providing performance guarantees for predictions made in unseen domains. In practice, there can be substantial uncertainty about the distribution of new data, and corresponding variability in the performance of existing predictors. Building on the theory of partial identi…
Since the rise of fair machine learning as a critical field of inquiry, many different notions on how to quantify and measure discrimination have been proposed in the literature. Some of these notions, however, were shown to be mutually incompatible. Such findings make it appear that numerous differ…
Structural learning is arguably one of the most challenging and pervasive tasks found throughout the data sciences. There exists a growing literature that studies structural learning in non-parametric settings where conditional independence constraints are taken to define the equivalence class. In t…
Learning personalized treatment policies is a formative challenge in many real-world applications, including in healthcare, econometrics, artificial intelligence. However, the effectiveness of candidate policies is not always identifiable, i.e., it is not uniquely computable from the combination of…
One key assumption in machine learning literature is that the testing and training data come from the same distribution, which is often violated in practice. The anchors that allow generalizations to take place are causal, and provenient in terms of the stability and modularity of the mechanisms und…
Causal effect identification and estimation are two crucial tasks in causal inference. Although causal effect identification has been theoretically resolved, many existing estimators only address a subset of scenarios, known as the sequential back-door adjustment (SBD) (Pearl and Robins, 1995) or g-…
One of the fundamental challenges found throughout the data sciences is to explain why things happen in specific ways, or through which mechanisms a certain variable $X$ exerts influences over another variable $Y$. In statistics and machine learning, significant efforts have been put into developing…
Reasoning about the effect of interventions and counterfactuals is a fundamental task found throughout the data sciences. A collection of principles, algorithms, and tools has been developed for performing such tasks in the last decades. One of the pervasive requirements found throughout this liter…
As society transitions towards an AI-based decision-making infrastructure, an ever-increasing number of decisions once under control of humans are now delegated to automated systems. Even though such developments make various parts of society more efficient, a large body of evidence suggests that a…
One of the most common ways children learn when unfamiliar with the environment is by mimicking adults. Imitation learning concerns an imitator learning to behave in an unknown environment from an expert's demonstration; reward signals remain latent to the imitator. This paper studies imitation lear…
A fundamental problem in many sciences is the learning of causal structure underlying a system, typically through observation and experimentation. Commonly, one even collects data across multiple domains, such as gene sequencing from different labs, or neural recordings from different species. Altho…
Learning cause and effect relations is arguably one of the central challenges found throughout the data sciences. Formally, determining whether a collection of observational and interventional distributions can be combined to learn a target causal relation is known as the problem of generalized iden…
Estimating the effects of multi-dimensional treatments (i.e., joint treatment effects) is critical in many data-intensive domains, including genetics and drug evaluation. The main challenges for studying the joint treatment effects include the need for large sample sizes to explore different treatme…
Evaluating hypothetical statements about how the world would be had a different course of action been taken is arguably one key capability expected from modern AI systems. Counterfactual reasoning underpins discussions in fairness, the determination of blame and responsibility, credit assignment, an…
We study causal representation learning, the task of inferring latent causal variables and their causal relations from high-dimensional functions (“mixtures”) of the variables. Prior work relies on weak supervision, in the form of counterfactual pre- and post-intervention views or temporal structure…
One common task in many data sciences applications is to answer questions about the effect of new interventions, like: `what would happen to $Y$ if we make $X$ equal to $x$ while observing covariates $Z=z$?'. Formally, this is known as conditional effect identification, where the goal is to determin…
Visual representations underlie object recognition tasks, but they often contain both robust and non-robust features. Our main observation is that image classifiers may perform poorly on out-of-distribution samples because spurious correlations between non-robust features and labels can be changed i…
Generalizing causal knowledge across environments is a common challenge shared across many of the data-driven disciplines, including AI and ML. Experiments are usually performed in one environment (e.g., in a lab, on Earth, in a training ground), almost invariably, with the intent of being used else…
Identifying the effects of new interventions from data is a significant challenge found across a wide range of the empirical sciences. A well-known strategy for identifying such effects is Pearl's front-door (FD) criterion. The definition of the FD criterion is declarative, only allowing one to deci…
Causal contributions measure the strengths of different causes to a target quantity. Understanding causal contributions is important in empirical sciences and data-driven disciplines since it allows to answer practical queries like “what are the contributions of each cause to the effect?” In this pa…
Combination therapy refers to the use of multiple treatments -- such as surgery, medication, and behavioral therapy - to cure a single disease, and has become a cornerstone for treating various conditions including cancer, HIV, and depression. All possible combinations of treatments lead to a collec…
This paper investigates the problem of bounding counterfactual queries from an arbitrary collection of observational and experimental distributions and qualitative knowledge about the underlying data-generating model represented in the form of a causal diagram. We show that all counterfactual distri…
We investigate the problem of bounding causal effects from experimental studies in which treatment assignment is randomized but the subject compliance is imperfect. It is well known that under such conditions, the actual causal effects are not point-identifiable due to uncontrollable unobserved conf…
Causal effect identification is concerned with determining whether a causal effect is computable from a combination of qualitative assumptions about the underlying system (e.g., a causal graph) and distributions collected from this system. Many identification algorithms exclusively rely on graphical…
Local treatment effects are a common quantity found throughout the empirical sciences that measure the treatment effect among those who comply with what they are assigned. Most of the literature is focused on estimating the average of such quantity, which is called the ``local average treatment effe…
General methods have been developed for estimating causal effects from observational data under causal assumptions encoded in the form of a causal graph. Most of this literature assumes that the underlying causal graph is completely specified. However, only observational data is available in most pr…
Identifying causal effects from observational data is a pervasive challenge found throughout the empirical sciences. Very general methods have been developed to decide the identifiability of a causal quantity from a combination of observational data and causal knowledge about the underlying system.…
The Ladder of Causation describes three qualitatively different types of activities an agent may be interested in engaging in, namely, seeing (observational), doing (interventional), and imagining (counterfactual) (Pearl and Mackenzie, 2018). The inferential challenge imposed by the causal hierarchy…
"Monkey see monkey do" is an age-old adage, referring to naive imitation without a deep understanding of a system's underlying mechanics. Indeed, if a demonstrator has access to information unavailable to the imitator (monkey), such as a different set of sensors, then no matter how perfectly the imi…
One of the central elements of any causal inference is an object called structural causal model (SCM), which represents a collection of mechanisms and exogenous sources of random variation of the system under investigation (Pearl, 2000). An important property of many kinds of neural networks is univ…
One fundamental problem in the empirical sciences is of reconstructing the causal structure that underlies a phenomenon of interest through observation and experimentation. While there exists a plethora of methods capable of learning the equivalence class of causal structures that are compatible wit…
Causal effect identifiability is concerned with establishing the effect of intervening on a set of variables on another set of variables from observational or interventional distributions under causal assumptions that are usually encoded in the form of a causal graph. Most of the results of this lit…
One of the common ways children learn is by mimicking adults. Imitation learning focuses on learning policies with suitable performance from demonstrations generated by an expert, with an unspecified performance measure, and unobserved reward signal. Popular methods for imitation learning start by e…
Intelligent agents are continuously faced with the challenge of optimizing a policy based on what they can observe (see) and which actions they can take (do) in the environment where they are deployed. Most policy can be parametrized in terms of these two dimensions, i.e., as a function of what can…
We develop a polynomial-time algorithm for identification of structural coefficients in linear causal models that subsumes previous efficient state-of-the-art methods, unifying several disparate approaches to identification in this setting. Building on these results, we develop a procedure for ident…
The challenge of generalizing causal knowledge across different environments is pervasive in scientific explorations, including in AI, ML, and Data Science. Experiments are usually performed in one environment (e.g., in a lab, on Earth) with the intent, almost invariably, of being used elsewhere (e.…
Learning causal effects from data is a fundamental problem across the sciences. Determining the identifiability of a target effect from a combination of the observational distribution and the causal graph underlying a phenomenon is well-understood in theory. However, in practice, it remains a challe…
Generalizing causal effects from a controlled experiment to settings beyond the particular study population is arguably one of the central tasks found in empirical circles. While a proper design and careful execution of the experiment would support, under mild conditions, the validity of inferences…
Causal effect identification is the task of determining whether a causal distribution is computable from the combination of an observational distribution and substantive knowledge about the domain under investigation. One of the most studied versions of this problem assumes that knowledge is articul…
The challenge of learning the causal structure underlying a certain phenomenon is undertaken by connecting the set of conditional independences (CIs) readable from the observational data, on the one side, with the set of corresponding constraints implied over the graphical structure, on the other,…
One of the most common mistakes made when performing data analysis is attributing causal meaning to regression coefficients. Formally, a causal effect can only be computed if it is identifiable from a combination of observational data and structural knowledge about the domain under investigation (Pe…
We study the problem of causal identification from an arbitrary collection of observational and experimental distributions, and substantive knowledge about the phenomenon under investigation, which usually comes in the form of a causal graph. We call this problem \textit{g-identifiability}, or gID…
Causal identification is the problem of deciding whether a post-interventional distribution is computable from a combination of qualitative knowledge about the data-generating process, which is encoded in a causal diagram, and an observational distribution. A generalization of this problem restricts…
A dynamic treatment regime (DTR) consists of a sequence of decision rules, one per stage of intervention, that dictates how to determine the treatment assignment to patients based on evolving treatments and covariates' history. These regimes are particularly effective for managing chronic disorders…
Causal inference requires assumptions about the data generating process, many of which are unverifiable from the data. Given that some causal assumptions might be uncertain or disputed, formal methods are needed to quantify how sensitive research conclusions are to violations of those assumptions. A…
We study the problem of causal structure learning when the experimenter is limited to perform at most $k$ non-adaptive experiments of size $1$. We formulate the problem of finding the best intervention target set as an optimization problem, which aims to maximize the average number of edges whose di…
The Equalized Odds (for short, EO) is one of the most popular measures of discrimination used in the supervised learning setting. It ascertains fairness through the balance of the misclassification rates (false positive and negative) across the protected groups -- e.g., in the context of law enforc…
We study the problem of identifying the best action in a sequential decision-making setting when the reward distributions of the arms exhibit a non-trivial dependence structure, which is governed by the underlying causal model of the domain where the agent is deployed. In this setting, playing an ar…
The Multi-Armed Bandit problem with Unobserved Confounders (MABUC) considers decision-making settings where unmeasured variables can influence both the agent’s decisions and received rewards (Bareinboim et al., 2015). Recent findings showed that unobserved confounders (UCs) pose a unique challenge t…
We consider the problem of learning causal structures with latent variables using interventions. Our objective is not only to learn the causal graph between the observed variables, but to locate unobserved variables that could confound the relationship between observables. Our approach is stage-wise…
We developed a novel approach to identification and model testing in linear structural equation models (SEMs) based on auxiliary variables (AVs), which generalizes a widely-used family of methods known as instrumental variables. The identification problem is concerned with the conditions under which…
The Multi-Armed Bandit problem constitutes an archetypal setting for sequential decision-making, permeating multiple domains including engineering, business, and medicine. One of the hallmarks of a bandit setting is the agent's capacity to explore its environment through active intervention, which c…