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LLMs are increasingly embedded in everyday decision-making, yet their outputs can encode subtle, unintended behaviours that shape user beliefs and actions. We refer to these covert, goal-directed behaviours as hidden intentions, which may…
Various measures can be used to estimate bias or unfairness in a predictor. Previous work has already established that some of these measures are incompatible with each other. Here we show that, when groups differ in prevalence of the…
An important strategy for identifying principal causal effects, which are often used in settings with noncompliance, is to invoke the principal ignorability (PI) assumption. As PI is untestable, it is important to gauge how sensitive effect…
Nowadays, the experimental study of emotional learning is commonly based on classical conditioning paradigms and models, which have been thoroughly investigated in the last century. On the contrary, limited attention has been paid to the…
This study examines whether unobserved factors substantially bias education evaluations that rely on the Conditional Independence Assumption. We add 14 new within-study comparisons to the literature, all from primary schools in England.…
Could an AI have conscious experiences? Any answer to this question should conform to Evidentialism - that is, it should be based not on intuition, dogma or speculation but on solid scientific evidence. I argue that such evidence is hard to…
When constructing a model to estimate the causal effect of a treatment, it is necessary to control for other factors which may have confounding effects. Because the ignorability assumption is not testable, however, it is usually unclear…
In simple perceptual decisions the brain has to identify a stimulus based on noisy sensory samples from the stimulus. Basic statistical considerations state that the reliability of the stimulus information, i.e., the amount of noise in the…
Causal mediation analysis decomposes the total treatment effect into a portion operating through a hypothesized mediator and a residual direct portion. Identification of natural direct and indirect effects typically rests on the mediator…
In observational studies, identification of ATEs is generally achieved by assuming that the correct set of confounders has been measured and properly included in the relevant models. Because this assumption is both strong and untestable, a…
Autonomous systems that rely on learned perception can make unsafe decisions when sensor readings are misclassified. We study shielding for this setting: given a proposed action, a shield blocks actions that could violate safety. We…
In the context of having an instrumental variable, the standard practice in causal inference begins by targeting an effect of interest and proceeds by formulating assumptions enabling its identification. We turn this around by adhering to…
Understanding the effects of interventions is central to scientific progress, with randomized controlled trials (RCTs) regarded as the gold standard for causal inference in many applied fields. However, RCTs are costly, time-consuming, and…
To estimate direct and indirect effects of an exposure on an outcome from observed data strong assumptions about unconfoundedness are required. Since these assumptions cannot be tested using the observed data, a mediation analysis should…
We introduce several methods for assessing sensitivity to unmeasured confounding in marginal structural models; importantly we allow treatments to be discrete or continuous, static or time-varying. We consider three sensitivity models: a…
Two problems that arise in making causal inferences for non-mortality outcomes such as bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) are unmeasured confounding and censoring by death, i.e., the outcome is only observed when subjects survive. In…
The increasing impact of algorithmic decisions on people's lives compels us to scrutinize their fairness and, in particular, the disparate impacts that ostensibly-color-blind algorithms can have on different groups. Examples include credit…
In observational studies, the observed association between an exposure and outcome of interest may be distorted by unobserved confounding. Causal sensitivity analysis can be used to assess the robustness of observed associations to…
Most research on the interpretability of machine learning systems focuses on the development of a more rigorous notion of interpretability. I suggest that a better understanding of the deficiencies of the intuitive notion of…
Causal inference relies on the untestable assumption of no unmeasured confounding. Sensitivity analysis can be used to quantify the impact of unmeasured confounding on causal estimates. Among sensitivity analysis methods proposed in the…