84 accepted papers
While significant progress has been made in heterogeneous treatment effect (HTE) estimation, the evaluation of HTE estimators remains underdeveloped. In this article, we propose a robust evaluation framework based on relative error, which quantifies performance differences between two HTE estimators…
Strategic classification studies the interaction between decision models and agents who strategically manipulate their features for favorable outcomes. Existing SC frameworks typically rely on the idealized assumption that agents are strictly rational. However, evidence from behavioral economics and…
Causal discovery is a critical yet persistently challenging task across scientific domains. Despite years of significant algorithmic advances, existing methods still struggle with inconsistent outcomes due to reliance on untestable assumptions, sensitivity to data perturbations, and optimization con…
Adapting to latent confounded shift remains a core challenge in modern AI. This setting is driven by hidden variables that induce spurious correlations between inputs and outputs during training, leading models to rely on non-causal shortcuts. For example, a model may learn to treat metadata (e.g., …
Training time-series forecast models requires aligning the conditional distribution of model forecasts with that of the label sequence. The standard direct forecast (DF) approach seeks to minimize the conditional negative log-likelihood of the label sequence, typically estimated using the mean squa…
Large language models (LLMs) struggle with complex logical reasoning. Previous work has primarily explored single-agent methods, with their performance remains fundamentally limited by the capabilities of a single model. To our knowledge, this paper first introduce a multi-agent approach specificall…
Causal inference in modern large-scale systems faces growing challenges, including high-dimensional covariates, multi-valued treatments, massive observational (OBS) data, and limited randomized controlled trial (RCT) samples due to cost constraints. We formalize treatment-induced structural non-over…
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have attracted significant interest in extending their capabilities to multimodal scenarios, particularly for speech-to-speech conversational systems. However, existing multimodal models handling interleaved audio and text rely on autoregressive (AR) m…
Memory-based test-time adaptation (TTA) assigns streaming test samples into class-specific memory slots based on pseudo-labels predicted by models like CLIP, and retrieves them to facilitate subsequent predictions under distribution shift. However, this process introduces two challenges: ❶ **Each sa…
Logical consistency, the requirement that statements remain non-contradictory under logical rules, is fundamental for trustworthy reasoning, yet current LLMs often fail to maintain it even on simple inference tasks. Existing benchmarks for LLM logical consistency are not scalable, not diverse, and n…
Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with complex logical reasoning. Existing approaches typically rely on either purely neural reasoning in natural language or offloading to formal solvers via symbolic representations. However, both paradigms face significant limitations: while LLMs exhibit …
Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have catalyzed transformative progress in affective computing, enabling models to exhibit emergent emotional intelligence. Despite substantial methodological progress, current emotional benchmarks remain limited, as it is still unknown: (a)…
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks but struggle with complex logical reasoning, particularly in real-world settings. Existing research is largely confined to the closed-world assumption, which posits that all premises requ…
Reward models are fundamental to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), yet real-world datasets are inevitably corrupted by noisy preference. Conventional training objectives tend to overfit these errors, while existing denoising approaches often rely on homogeneous noise assumptions tha…
LLM-driven agents demonstrate strong performance in sequential decision-making but often rely on on-the-fly reasoning, re-deriving solutions even in recurring scenarios. This insufficient experience reuse leads to computational redundancy and execution instability. To bridge this gap, we propose Pro…
The design of training objective is central to training time-series forecasting models. Existing training objectives such as mean squared error mostly treat each future step as an independent, equally weighted task, which we found leading to the following two issues: (1) overlook the *label autocorr…
Gradual Domain Adaption (GDA) aims to mitigate domain shift by progressively adapting models from the source domain to the target domain via intermediate domains. However, real intermediate domains are often unavailable or ineffective, necessitating the synthesis of intermediate samples. Flow-based …
Adversarial Security of Financial Language Models (ASFLM) is critical as Large Language Models (LLMs) pervade high-stakes financial applications. However, LLMs face two key challenges: their vulnerability to damaging adversarial attacks and the prevalent research gap concerning robust defenses again
While traditional network analysis focuses on single-layer networks, real-world systems often form multilayer networks with multiple relationship types. However, existing methods typically fail to capture complex inter-layer dependencies by treating layers independently or aggregating them. To addre…
Federated recommendations (FRs), facilitating multiple local clients to collectively learn a global model without disclosing user private data, have emerged as a prevalent on-device service. In conventional FRs, a dominant paradigm is to utilize discrete identities to represent clients and items, wh
In-context learning (ICL) enables pre-trained transformers (TFs) to perform few-shot learning across diverse tasks, fostering growing research into its underlying mechanisms. However, existing studies typically assume a causally-sufficient regime, overlooking spurious correlations and prediction bia…
Treatment responder classification seeks to learn a rule to classify individuals who will benefit from the treatment. This paper studies a new scenario in treatment responder classification when abstention is allowed, i.e., practitioners can opt out of making uncertain classification on some individ…
Despite the success of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) in aligning language models, current reward modeling heavily relies on explicit preference data with high collection costs. In this work, we study implicit reward modeling---learning reward models from implicit human feedback--…
Amortized causal inference via Prior-data Fitted Networks (PFNs) has emerged as a promising paradigm, enabling zero-shot estimation of causal effects without the need for dataset-specific model tuning. However, the principled effectiveness of unified pre-training across general interventional regime…
Uplift modeling has obtained significant attention, with broad applications in medicine, economics, and marketing. For example, in a push notification scenario, accurately estimating the uplift of different push frequencies on user activation and notification switch close rate is critical for balanc
Tabular foundation models via pretrained prior-data fitted networks (PFNs) achieve remarkable generalization performance on arbitrary testing tabular data, when sample distributions are independent of the deployed classifiers, i.e., a non-strategic regime. In a variety of real-world scenarios, howev…
Designing experiments for causal effect estimation remains an enduring topic in both machine learning and statistics. While much of the existing statistical literature focuses on using central limit theorems to analyze asymptotic properties of estimators, a parallel line of research has emerged arou…
The escalating complexity of modern codebases has intensified the need for code retrieval systems capable of interpreting cross-component change intents—a capability fundamentally absent in conventional function-level search paradigms. While recent research has improved alignment between queries and
Strategic classification (SC) explores how individuals or entities modify their features strategically to achieve favorable classification outcomes. However, existing SC methods, which are largely based on linear models or shallow neural networks, face significant limitations in terms of scalability…
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting plays an indispensable role in endowing large language models (LLMs) with complex reasoning capabilities. However, CoT currently faces two fundamental challenges: (1) Sufficiency, which ensures that the generated intermediate inference steps comprehensively cover and…
Role-playing is a crucial capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling a wide range of practical applications, including intelligent non-player characters, digital twins, and emotional companions. Evaluating this capability in LLMs is challenging due to the complex dynamics involved in role-…
In recommendation systems, implicit feedback data can be automatically recorded and is more common than explicit feedback data. However, implicit feedback poses two challenges for relevance prediction, namely (a) positive-unlabeled (PU): negative feedback does not necessarily imply low relevance and…
When building a world model, a common assumption is that the environment has a single, unchanging underlying causal rule, like applying Newton's laws to every situation. However, in truly open-ended environments, the apparent causal mechanism may drift over time because the agent continually encount…
Federated continual learning (FCL) has garnered increasing attention for its ability to support distributed computation in environments with evolving data distributions. However, the emergence of new tasks introduces both temporal and cross-client shifts, making catastrophic forgetting a critical ch…
Wearable Human Activity Recognition (WHAR) is a prominent research area within ubiquitous computing. Multi-sensor synchronous measurement has proven to be more effective for WHAR than using a single sensor. However, existing WHAR methods use shared convolutional kernels for indiscriminate temporal f…
In multi-armed bandits with network interference (MABNI), the action taken by one node can influence the rewards of others, creating complex interdependence. While existing research on MABNI largely concentrates on minimizing regret, it often overlooks the crucial concern that an excessive emphasis…
Time-varying counterfactual prediction (TCP) from observational data supports the answer of when and how to assign multiple sequential treatments, yielding importance in various applications. Despite the progress achieved by recent advances, e.g., LSTM or Transformer based causal approaches, their c…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable successes on various tasks. However, recent studies have found that there are still significant challenges to the logical reasoning abilities of LLMs, which can be categorized into the following two aspects: (1) Logical question answering: LLMs o
Fairness in human and algorithmic decision-making is crucial in areas such as criminal justice, education, and social welfare. Recently, counterfactual fairness has drawn increasing research interest, suggesting that decision-making for individuals should remain the same when intervening with differ…
Time series modeling presents unique challenges due to autocorrelation in both historical data and future sequences. While current research predominantly addresses autocorrelation within historical data, the correlations among future labels are often overlooked. Specifically, modern forecasting mode…
This paper considers the challenging problem of 3D Human Pose Estimation (HPE) from a sparse set of Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs). Existing efforts typically reconstruct a pose sequence by either directly tackling whole-body motions or focusing on distinctive spatio-temporal features of local bo…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have attained human-level fluency in text generation, which complicates the distinguishing between human-written and LLM generated texts. This increases the risk of misuse and highlights the need for reliable detectors. Yet, existing detectors exhibit poor robustness on…
Iterative imputation is a prevalent method for completing missing data, which involves iteratively imputing each feature by treating it as a target variable and predicting its missing values using the remaining features. However, existing iterative imputation methods exhibit two critical defects: (…
In-context learning with large language models (LLMs) delivers strong few-shot performance by choosing few-shot demonstrations from the entire training dataset. However, previous few-shot in-context learning methods, which calculate similarity scores for choosing demonstrations, incur high computati…
Counterfactual inference aims to estimate the counterfactual outcome at the individual level given knowledge of an observed treatment and the factual outcome, with broad applications in fields such as epidemiology, econometrics, and management science. Previous methods rely on a known structural cau…
Deep networks are prone to catastrophic forgetting during sequential task learning, i.e., losing the knowledge about old tasks upon learning new tasks. To this end, continual learning (CL) has emerged, whose existing methods focus mostly on regulating or protecting the parameters associated with the…
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved considerable accuracy in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) from static images. However, their efficacy in video OCR is significantly diminished due to factors such as motion blur, temporal variations, and visual effects inherent in video conte…
We introduce MeshPad, a generative approach that creates 3D meshes from sketch inputs. Building on recent advances in artist-reminiscent triangle mesh generation, our approach addresses the need for interactive mesh creation. To this end, we focus on enabling consistent edits by decomposing editing…
Identifying causal relationships rather than spurious correlations between words and class labels plays a crucial role in building robust text classifiers. Previous studies proposed using causal effects to distinguish words that are causally related to the sentiment, and then building robust text cl
This paper presents $\mathbf{OLinear}$, a $\mathbf{linear}$-based multivariate time series forecasting model that operates in an $\mathbf{o}$rthogonally transformed domain. Recent forecasting models typically adopt the temporal forecast (TF) paradigm, which directly encode and decode time series in…
Missing data imputation through distribution alignment has demonstrated advantages for non-temporal datasets but exhibits suboptimal performance in time-series applications. The primary obstacle is crafting a discrepancy measure that simultaneously (1) captures temporal patterns—accounting for perio…
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) often encounter significant performance degradation under distribution shifts between training and test data, hindering their applicability in real-world scenarios. Recent studies have proposed various methods to address the out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization chall…
Fashion image editing is a valuable tool for designers to convey their creative ideas by visualizing design concepts. With the recent advances in text editing methods, significant progress has been made in fashion image editing. However, they face two key challenges: spurious correlations in trainin…
Training time-series forecast models presents unique challenges in designing effective learning objectives. Existing methods predominantly utilize the temporal mean squared error, which faces two critical challenges: (1) label autocorrelation, which leads to bias from the label sequence likelihood;…
Recent booming time series models have demonstrated remarkable forecasting performance. However, these methods often place greater focus on more effectively modelling the historical series, largely neglecting the forecasting phase, which generates long-term forecasts by separately predicting multipl…
Implicit feedback recommendation is challenged by the missing negative feedback essential for effective model training. Existing methods often resort to negative sampling, a technique that assumes unlabeled interactions as negative samples. This assumption risks misclassifying potential positive sam…
Multi-modal knowledge graph completion (MMKGC) enhances the structural and semantic richness of knowledge graphs by integrating diverse information across modalities. However, existing methods often either overlook the diversity within a single modality or fail to ensure effective cross-modality ali…
Selection bias poses a widely recognized challenge for unbiased evaluation and learning in many industrial scenarios. For example, in recommender systems, it arises from the users' selective interactions with items. Recently, doubly robust and its variants have been widely studied to achieve debiase…
A key challenge for controllable image editing is that visual attributes with semantic meanings are not always independent, resulting in spurious correlations in model training. However, most existing methods ignore such issues, leading to biased causal visual representation learning and unintended…
Resulting from non-random sample selection caused by both the treatment and outcome, collider bias poses a unique challenge to treatment effect estimation using observational data whose distribution differs from that of the target population. In this paper, we rethink collider bias from an out-of-di…
Developing fair automated machine learning algorithms is critical in making safe and trustworthy decisions. Many causality-based fairness notions have been proposed to address the above issues by quantifying the causal connections between sensitive attributes and decisions, and when the true causal…
The collected data in recommender systems generally suffers selection bias. Considerable works are proposed to address selection bias induced by observed user and item features, but they fail when hidden features (e.g., user age or salary) that affect both user selection mechanism and feedback exist…
Selection bias in recommender system arises from the recommendation process of system filtering and the interactive process of user selection. Many previous studies have focused on addressing selection bias to achieve unbiased learning of the prediction model, but ignore the fact that potential outc…
Estimating the individuals' potential response to varying treatment doses is crucial for decision-making in areas such as precision medicine and management science. Most recent studies predict counterfactual outcomes by learning a covariate representation that is independent of the treatment variabl…
Collaborative filtering builds personalized models from the collected user feedback. However, the collected data is observational rather than experimental, leading to various biases in the data, which can significantly affect the learned model. To address this issue, many studies have focused on pro…
This paper studies the causal relations from subsampled time series, in which measurements are sparse and sampled at a coarser timescale than the causal timescale of the underlying system. In such data, because there are numerous missing time-slices (i.e., cross-sections at each time point) between…
One of the significant challenges in treatment effect estimation is collider bias, a specific form of sample selection bias induced by the common causes of both the treatment and outcome. Identifying treatment effects under collider bias requires well-defined shadow variables in observational data,…
Out-of-distribution (OOD) problems in few-shot classification (FSC) occur when novel classes sampled from testing distributions differ from base classes drawn from training distributions, which considerably degrades the performance of deep learning models deployed in real-world applications. Recent…
The spurious correlation between the background features of the image and its label arises due to that the samples labeled with the same class in the training set often co-occurs with a specific background, which will cause the encoder to extract non-semantic features for classification, resulting i…
Fairness has become a crucial aspect in the development of trustworthy machine learning algorithms. Current fairness metrics to measure the violation of demographic parity have the following drawbacks: (i) the *average difference* of model predictions on two groups cannot reflect their *distribution…
Recommender system aims to recommend items or information that may interest users based on their behaviors and preferences. However, there may be sampling selection bias in the data collection process, i.e., the collected data is not a representative of the target population. Many debiasing methods…
Diffusion models have demonstrated competitive performance in missing data imputation (MDI) task. However, directly applying diffusion models to MDI produces suboptimal performance due to two primary defects. First, the sample diversity promoted by diffusion models hinders the accurate inference of…
We propose SceneTex a novel method for effectively generating high-quality and style-consistent textures for indoor scenes using depth-to-image diffusion priors. Unlike previous methods that either iteratively warp 2D views onto a mesh surface or distillate diffusion latent features without accurate…
Canonical work handling distribution shifts typically necessitates an entire target distribution that lands inside the training distribution. However, practical scenarios often involve only a handful target samples, potentially lying outside the training support, which requires the capability of ext…
Item-side group fairness (IGF) requires a recommendation model to treat different item groups similarly, and has a crucial impact on information diffusion, consumption activity, and market equilibrium. Previous IGF notions only focus on the direct utility of the item exposures, i.e., the exposure nu…
The robustness of signal temporal logic not only assesses whether a signal adheres to a specification but also provides a measure of how much a formula is fulfilled or violated. The calculation of robustness is based on evaluating the robustness of underlying predicates. However, the robustness of p
In recommender systems, a common problem is the presence of various biases in the collected data, which deteriorates the generalization ability of the recommendation models and leads to inaccurate predictions. Doubly robust (DR) learning has been studied in many tasks in RS, with the advantage that…
Estimating individual treatment effects from observational data is challenging due to treatment selection bias. Prevalent methods mainly mitigate this issue by aligning different treatment groups in the latent space, the core of which is the calculation of distribution discrepancy. However, two issu…
Propensity-based weighting methods have been widely studied and demonstrated competitive performance in debiased recommendations. Nevertheless, there are still many questions to be addressed. How to estimate the propensity more conducive to debiasing performance? Which metric is more reasonable to m…
In recommender systems, the collected data used for training is always subject to selection bias, which poses a great challenge for unbiased learning. Previous studies proposed various debiasing methods based on observed user and item features, but ignored the effect of hidden confounding. To addres…
In recommender systems, users always choose the favorite items to rate, which leads to data missing not at random and poses a great challenge for unbiased evaluation and learning of prediction models. Currently, the doubly robust (DR) methods have been widely studied and demonstrate superior perform…
Bias is a common problem inherent in recommender systems, which is entangled with users' preferences and poses a great challenge to unbiased learning. For debiasing tasks, the doubly robust (DR) method and its variants show superior performance due to the double robustness property, that is, DR is u…
Trustworthy policy learning has significant importance in making reliable and harmless treatment decisions for individuals. Previous policy learning approaches aim at the well-being of subgroups by maximizing the utility function (e.g., conditional average causal effects, post-view click-through&con…
Recently, recommender system (RS) based on causal inference has gained much attention in the industrial community, as well as the states of the art performance in many prediction and debiasing tasks. Nevertheless, a unified causal analysis framework has not been established yet. Many causal-based pr…