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Feng Xie

30 accepted papers

2026

A Recursive Decomposition Framework for Causal Structure Learning in the Presence of Latent Variables

ICML 2026oral

Constraint-based causal discovery is widely used for learning causal structures, but heavy reliance on conditional independence (CI) testing makes it computationally expensive in high-dimensional settings. To mitigate this limitation, many divide-and-conquer frameworks have been proposed, but most a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Local Covariate Selection for Average Causal Effect Estimation without Pretreatment and Causal Sufficiency Assumptions

ICML 2026spotlight

Causal effect estimation is a fundamental task in many scientific fields. Selecting appropriate covariates for adjustment is crucial for obtaining unbiased causal effects. However, most existing methods either rely on learning the global causal structure, assume the absence of latent variables, or i…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Data-Driven Selection of Instrumental Variables for Additive Nonlinear, Constant Effects Models

ICML 2025poster

We consider the problem of selecting instrumental variables from observational data, a fundamental challenge in causal inference. Existing methods mostly focus on additive linear, constant effects models, limiting their applicability in complex real-world scenarios. In this paper, we tackle a more…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

FreeAlign: Superior Text-Image Alignment by Modulating Prompt Attention

ICASSP 2025accepted

In recent years, Text-to-Image (T2I) models have made remarkable advancements, yet accurate accurate association of attributes remains a key challenge. This paper presents FreeAlign, a novel training-free framework designed to enhance attribute alignment in T2I generation. By modulating attention an…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Identification of Latent Confounders via Investigating the Tensor Ranks of the Nonlinear Observations

ICML 2025poster

We study the problem of learning discrete latent variable causal structures from mixed-type observational data. Traditional methods, such as those based on the tensor rank condition, are designed to identify discrete latent structure models and provide robust identification bounds for discrete causa…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Identifying Causal Mechanism Shifts Under Additive Models with Arbitrary Noise

IJCAI 2025

In many real-world scenarios, the goal is to identify variables whose causal mechanisms change across related datasets. For example, detecting abnormal root nodes in manufacturing, and identifying key genes that influence cancer by analyzing differences in gene regulatory mechanisms between healthy

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Local Identifying Causal Relations in the Presence of Latent Variables

ICML 2025spotlight

We tackle the problem of identifying whether a variable is the cause of a specified target using observational data. State-of-the-art causal learning algorithms that handle latent variables typically rely on identifying the global causal structure, often represented as a partial ancestral graph (PAG…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Local Learning for Covariate Selection in Nonparametric Causal Effect Estimation with Latent Variables

NeurIPS 2025poster

Estimating causal effects from nonexperimental data is a fundamental problem in many fields of science. A key component of this task is selecting an appropriate set of covariates for confounding adjustment to avoid bias. Most existing methods for covariate selection often assume the absence of laten…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Stable Control Visual AutoRegressive Model: Precise and Efficient Image Generation via Scale Alignment

ICASSP 2025accepted

Although diffusion models advance condition-based visual generation, they suffer from speed and cost issues, unlike faster AutoRegressive methods that are limited in performance. To address these, we introduce the Stable Control Visual AutoRegressive Model (SCVAR). SCVAR ensures stable control by al…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

UTC-RS: An Underwater Tracked Cleaning Robot System for Hydraulic Structures

RA-L 2025

During the inspection and maintenance of the underwater part of hydraulic structures, it is often necessary to clean the surface of a certain area for subsequent operations. At present, there are still few robots capable of underwater fine cleaning. Therefore, this letter introduces the design of a

Cited by 4SourceScholar
2024

Automating the Selection of Proxy Variables of Unmeasured Confounders

ICML 2024spotlight

Recently, interest has grown in the use of proxy variables of unobserved confounding for inferring the causal effect in the presence of unmeasured confounders from observational data. One difficulty inhibiting the practical use is finding valid proxy variables of unobserved confounding to a target c…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Identification and Estimation of the Bi-Directional MR with Some Invalid Instruments

NeurIPS 2024oral

We consider the challenging problem of estimating causal effects from purely observational data in the bi-directional Mendelian randomization (MR), where some invalid instruments, as well as unmeasured confounding, usually exist. To address this problem, most existing methods attempt to find proper…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Learning Discrete Latent Variable Structures with Tensor Rank Conditions

NeurIPS 2024poster

Unobserved discrete data are ubiquitous in many scientific disciplines, and how to learn the causal structure of these latent variables is crucial for uncovering data patterns. Most studies focus on the linear latent variable model or impose strict constraints on latent structures, which fail to add…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Local Causal Structure Learning in the Presence of Latent Variables

ICML 2024poster

Discovering causal relationships from observational data, particularly in the presence of latent variables, poses a challenging problem. While current local structure learning methods have proven effective and efficient when the focus lies solely on the local relationships of a target variable, they…

2024

MSFR: Stance Detection Based on Multi-Aspect Semantic Feature Representation via Hierarchical Contrastive Learning

ICASSP 2024accepted

Zero-shot stance detection aims to determine the stance of previously unseen targets during the inference phase. Achieving effective feature alignment from seen targets to unseen targets is crucial for zero-shot stance detection. In this paper, we propose MSFR, a hierarchical contrastive learning fr…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Policy Learning for Balancing Short-Term and Long-Term Rewards

ICML 2024poster

Empirical researchers and decision-makers spanning various domains frequently seek profound insights into the long-term impacts of interventions. While the significance of long-term outcomes is undeniable, an overemphasis on them may inadvertently overshadow short-term gains. Motivated by this, this…

2024

SG2SC: A Generative Semantic Communication Framework for Scene Understanding-Oriented Image Transmission

ICASSP 2024accepted

In recent years, semantic communication based on deep learning for source-channel joint encoding has garnered significant attention. It utilizes network models trained end-to-end to represent signals as embedding vectors and has demonstrated superior performance compared to traditional methods. Howe…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Structural Estimation of Partially Observed Linear Non-Gaussian Acyclic Model: A Practical Approach with Identifiability

ICLR 2024poster

Conventional causal discovery approaches, which seek to uncover causal relationships among measured variables, are typically fragile to the presence of latent variables. While various methods have been developed to address this confounding issue, they often rely on strong assumptions about the under…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2023

Identification of Nonlinear Latent Hierarchical Models

NeurIPS 2023poster

Identifying latent variables and causal structures from observational data is essential to many real-world applications involving biological data, medical data, and unstructured data such as images and languages. However, this task can be highly challenging, especially when observed variables are ge…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2023

MixTEA: Semi-supervised Entity Alignment with Mixture Teaching

EMNLP 2023long findings

Semi-supervised entity alignment (EA) is a practical and challenging task because of the lack of adequate labeled mappings as training data. Most works address this problem by generating pseudo mappings for unlabeled entities. However, they either suffer from the erroneous (noisy) pseudo mappings or…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Multi-Arm Robot Task Planning for Fruit Harvesting Using Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

IROS 2023poster

The emergence of harvesting robotics offers a promising solution to the issue of limited agricultural labor resources and the increasing demand for fruits. Despite notable advancements in the field of harvesting robotics, the utilization of such technology in orchards is still limited. The key chall…

Cited by 9SourceScholar
2023

Some General Identification Results for Linear Latent Hierarchical Causal Structure

IJCAI 2023poster

We study the problem of learning hierarchical causal structure among latent variables from measured variables. While some existing methods are able to recover the latent hierarchical causal structure, they mostly suffer from restricted assumptions, including the tree-structured graph constraint, no…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2022

Identification of Linear Latent Variable Model with Arbitrary Distribution

AAAI 2022technical

An important problem across multiple disciplines is to infer and understand meaningful latent variables. One strategy commonly used is to model the measured variables in terms of the latent variables under suitable assumptions on the connectivity from the latents to the measured (known as measuremen…

Cited by 22SourcePDFScholar
2022

Identification of Linear Non-Gaussian Latent Hierarchical Structure

ICML 2022spotlight

Traditional causal discovery methods mainly focus on estimating causal relations among measured variables, but in many real-world problems, such as questionnaire-based psychometric studies, measured variables are generated by latent variables that are causally related. Accordingly, this paper invest…

Cited by 68SourcePDFScholar
2022

Latent Hierarchical Causal Structure Discovery with Rank Constraints

NeurIPS 2022accept

Most causal discovery procedures assume that there are no latent confounders in the system, which is often violated in real-world problems. In this paper, we consider a challenging scenario for causal structure identification, where some variables are latent and they may form a hierarchical graph st…

Cited by 57SourcePDFScholar
2021

Causal Discovery with Multi-Domain LiNGAM for Latent Factors

IJCAI 2021poster

Discovering causal structures among latent factors from observed data is a particularly challenging problem. Despite some efforts for this problem, existing methods focus on the single-domain data only. In this paper, we propose Multi-Domain Linear Non-Gaussian Acyclic Models for LAtent Factors (MD-…

Cited by 30SourcePDFScholar
2020

Generalized Independent Noise Condition for Estimating Latent Variable Causal Graphs

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

Causal discovery aims to recover causal structures or models underlying the observed data. Despite its success in certain domains, most existing methods focus on causal relations between observed variables, while in many scenarios the observed ones may not be the underlying causal variables (e.g., i…

Cited by 120SourcePDFScholar
2019

Triad Constraints for Learning Causal Structure of Latent Variables

NeurIPS 2019poster

Learning causal structure from observational data has attracted much attention, and it is notoriously challenging to find the underlying structure in the presence of confounders (hidden direct common causes of two variables). In this paper, by properly leveraging the non-Gaussianity of the data, we…

Cited by 84SourcePDFScholar