Related papers: Top-Down Causation by Information Control: From a …
Scientists often want to learn about cause and effect from hierarchical data, collected from subunits nested inside units. Consider students in schools, cells in patients, or cities in states. In such settings, unit-level variables (e.g.…
Controlling a dynamical system is the ability of changing its configuration arbitrarily through a suitable choice of inputs. It is a very well studied concept in control theory, with wide ranging applications in medicine, biology, social…
Causal nonseparability refers to processes where events take place in a coherent superposition of different causal orders. These may be the key resource for experimental violations of causal inequalities and have been recently identified as…
Built upon the concept of causal faithfulness, the so-called causal discovery algorithms propose the breakdown of mutual information (MI) and conditional mutual information (CMI) into sets of variables to reveal causal influences. These…
Pearl observes that causal knowledge enables predicting the effects of interventions, such as actions, whereas descriptive knowledge only permits drawing conclusions from observation. This paper extends Pearl's approach to causality and…
In the absence of randomized controlled and natural experiments, it is necessary to balance the distributions of (observable) covariates of the treated and control groups in order to obtain an unbiased estimate of a causal effect of…
In this position paper we discuss three main shortcomings of existing approaches to counterfactual causality from the computer science perspective, and sketch lines of work to try and overcome these issues: (1) causality definitions should…
Understanding climate change requires reasoning over complex causal networks. Yet, existing causal discovery datasets predominantly capture explicit, direct causal relations. We introduce ClimateCause, a manually expert-annotated dataset of…
Human explanations of natural language, rationales, form a tool to assess whether models learn a label for the right reasons or rely on dataset-specific shortcuts. Sufficiency is a common metric for estimating the informativeness of…
Causal inference is best understood using potential outcomes. This use is particularly important in more complex settings, that is, observational studies or randomized experiments with complications such as noncompliance. The topic of this…
This paper presents a rich knowledge representation language aimed at formalizing causal knowledge. This language is used for accurately and directly formalizing common benchmark examples from the literature of actual causality. A…
Control systems are sets of interconnected hardware and software components which regulate the behaviour of processes. The software of modern control systems rises for some years by requirements regarding the flexibility and functionality.…
Signal transduction, or signal-processing capability, is a fundamental property of nature that manifests universally across systems of different scales -- from quantum behaviour to the biological. This includes the detection of…
In this Chapter, we ask questions (1) What is the right way to measure the quality of information processing in a biological system? and (2) What can real-life organisms do in order to improve their performance in information-processing…
The inaccessibility of controlled randomized trials due to inherent constraints in many fields of science has been a fundamental issue in causal inference. In this paper, we focus on distinguishing the cause from effect in the bivariate…
Foundation models are trained on broad data distributions, yielding generalist capabilities that enable many downstream applications but also expand the space of potential misuse and failures. This position paper argues that capability…
We consider decision-making under incomplete information about an unknown state of nature. We show that a decision problem yields a higher value of information than another, uniformly across information structures, if and only if it is…
We propose an abductive diagnosis theory that integrates probabilistic, causal and taxonomic knowledge. Probabilistic knowledge allows us to select the most likely explanation; causal knowledge allows us to make reasonable independence…
Hierarchy is one of the most conspicuous features of numerous natural, technological and social systems. The underlying structures are typically complex and their most relevant organizational principle is the ordering of the ties among the…
Machine Learning explainability techniques have been proposed as a means of `explaining' or interrogating a model in order to understand why a particular decision or prediction has been made. Such an ability is especially important at a…