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Motivated by a recent literature on the double-descent phenomenon in machine learning, we consider highly over-parameterized models in causal inference, including synthetic control with many control units. In such models, there may be so…
Local decision rules are commonly understood to be more explainable, due to the local nature of the patterns involved. With numerical optimization methods such as gradient boosting, ensembles of local decision rules can gain good predictive…
This paper frames causal structure estimation as a machine learning task. The idea is to treat indicators of causal relationships between variables as `labels' and to exploit available data on the variables of interest to provide features…
Deep neural networks have achieved impressive performance and become the de-facto standard in many tasks. However, troubling phenomena such as adversarial and fooling examples suggest that the generalization they make is flawed. I argue…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) involves the use of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to make sequential decisions in order to maximize reward. For many tasks the resulting sequence of actions produced by a Deep RL policy can be long and…
We develop a general theory of omitted variable bias for a wide range of common causal parameters, including (but not limited to) averages of potential outcomes, average treatment effects, average causal derivatives, and policy effects from…
Double descent presents a counter-intuitive aspect within the machine learning domain, and researchers have observed its manifestation in various models and tasks. While some theoretical explanations have been proposed for this phenomenon…
Deep neural networks are complex and opaque. As they enter application in a variety of important and safety critical domains, users seek methods to explain their output predictions. We develop an approach to explaining deep neural networks…
Scaling laws in deep learning -- empirical power-law relationships linking model performance to resource growth -- have emerged as simple yet striking regularities across architectures, datasets, and tasks. These laws are particularly…
A fundamental feature of human intelligence is the ability to infer high-level abstractions from low-level sensory data. An essential component of such inference is the ability to discover modularized generative mechanisms. Despite many…
Training deep neural networks typically relies on backpropagating high dimensional error signals a computationally intensive process with little evidence supporting its implementation in the brain. However, since most tasks involve…
Compared to on-policy counterparts, off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning can improve data efficiency by repeatedly using the previously gathered data. However, off-policy learning becomes challenging when the discrepancy…
Machine learning is the science of discovering statistical dependencies in data, and the use of those dependencies to perform predictions. During the last decade, machine learning has made spectacular progress, surpassing human performance…
Causal inference is known to be very challenging when only observational data are available. Randomized experiments are often costly and impractical and in instrumental variable regression the number of instruments has to exceed the number…
We study the multiple manifold problem, a binary classification task modeled on applications in machine vision, in which a deep fully-connected neural network is trained to separate two low-dimensional submanifolds of the unit sphere. We…
The aim in many sciences is to understand the mechanisms that underlie the observed distribution of variables, starting from a set of initial hypotheses. Causal discovery allows us to infer mechanisms as sets of cause and effect…
Deep Reinforcement Learning has enabled the learning of policies for complex tasks in partially observable environments, without explicitly learning the underlying model of the tasks. While such model-free methods achieve considerable…
Rather than learning new control policies for each new task, it is possible, when tasks share some structure, to compose a "meta-policy" from previously learned policies. This paper reports results from experiments using Deep Reinforcement…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in a wide range of sequential decision-making problems. Recent diffusion-based policies further improve RL by modeling complex, high-dimensional action distributions. However,…
We present Causal Generative Neural Networks (CGNNs) to learn functional causal models from observational data. CGNNs leverage conditional independencies and distributional asymmetries to discover bivariate and multivariate causal…