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Zhi Geng

17 accepted papers

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

Fairness on Principal Stratum: A New Perspective on Counterfactual Fairness

ICML 2025poster

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…

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
2024

A Local Method for Satisfying Interventional Fairness with Partially Known Causal Graphs

NeurIPS 2024poster

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…

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

Be Aware of the Neighborhood Effect: Modeling Selection Bias under Interference

ICLR 2024poster

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…

2024

Debiased Collaborative Filtering with Kernel-Based Causal Balancing

ICLR 2024spotlight

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…

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

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

Relaxing the Accurate Imputation Assumption in Doubly Robust Learning for Debiased Collaborative Filtering

ICML 2024spotlight

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…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2023

Conditional counterfactual causal effect for individual attribution

UAI 2023poster

Identifying the causes of an event, also termed as causal attribution, is a commonly encountered task in many application problems. Available methods, mostly in Bayesian or causal inference literature, suffer from two main drawbacks: 1) cannot attribute for individuals, and 2) attributing one singl…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2023

Removing Hidden Confounding in Recommendation: A Unified Multi-Task Learning Approach

NeurIPS 2023poster

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…

Cited by 36SourcePDFScholar
2023

Trustworthy Policy Learning under the Counterfactual No-Harm Criterion

ICML 2023poster

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…

Cited by 27SourcePDFScholar
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
2020

Collapsible IDA: Collapsing Parental Sets for Locally Estimating Possible Causal Effects

UAI 2020poster

It is clear that some causal effects cannot be identified from observational data when the causal directed acyclic graph is absent. In such cases, IDA is a useful framework which estimates all possible causal effects by adjusting for all possible parental sets. In this paper, we combine the adjustme…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar