Related papers: Causal Abstraction: A Theoretical Foundation for M…

The need for modelling causal knowledge at different levels of granularity arises in several settings. Causal Abstraction provides a framework for formalizing this problem by relating two Structural Causal Models at different levels of…

Inner Interpretability is a promising emerging field tasked with uncovering the inner mechanisms of AI systems, though how to develop these mechanistic theories is still much debated. Moreover, recent critiques raise issues that question…

We consider a sequence of successively more restrictive definitions of abstraction for causal models, starting with a notion introduced by Rubenstein et al. (2017) called exact transformation that applies to probabilistic causal models,…

The black box nature of deep neural networks poses a significant challenge for the deployment of transparent and trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI) systems. With the growing presence of AI in society, it becomes increasingly important…

Interpretability provides a toolset for understanding how and why neural networks behave in certain ways. However, there is little unity in the field: most studies employ ad-hoc evaluations and do not share theoretical foundations, making…

Explainable artificial intelligence and interpretable machine learning are research domains growing in importance. Yet, the underlying concepts remain somewhat elusive and lack generally agreed definitions. While recent inspiration from…

Abstraction is a powerful idea widely used in science, to model, reason and explain the behavior of systems in a more tractable search space, by omitting irrelevant details. While notions of abstraction have matured for deterministic…

This note illustrates how a variety of causal abstraction arXiv:1707.00819 arXiv:1812.03789, defined here as causal abstractive simulation, can be used to formalize a simple example of language model simulation. This note considers the case…

An abstraction can be used to relate two structural causal models representing the same system at different levels of resolution. Learning abstractions which guarantee consistency with respect to interventional distributions would allow one…

This short paper discusses continually updated causal abstractions as a potential direction of future research. The key idea is to revise the existing level of causal abstraction to a different level of detail that is both consistent with…

Structural analysis methods (e.g., probing and feature attribution) are increasingly important tools for neural network analysis. We propose a new structural analysis method grounded in a formal theory of causal abstraction that provides…

Interpreting the inner function of neural networks is crucial for the trustworthy development and deployment of these black-box models. Prior interpretability methods focus on correlation-based measures to attribute model decisions to…

A core challenge in causal artificial intelligence is the principled coordination of multiple, imperfect, and subjective causal perspectives arising from distributed agents with limited and heterogeneous access to the environment. This…

Artificial intelligence (AI) is currently based largely on black-box machine learning models which lack interpretability. The field of eXplainable AI (XAI) strives to address this major concern, being critical in high-stakes areas such as…

Deep generative models, while revolutionizing fields like image and text generation, largely operate as opaque ``black boxes'', hindering human understanding, control, and alignment. While methods like sparse autoencoders (SAEs) show…

Model interpretability plays a central role in human-AI decision-making systems. Ideally, explanations should be expressed using human-interpretable semantic concepts. Moreover, the causal relations between these concepts should be captured…

Structural causal models (SCMs) are a widespread formalism to deal with causal systems. A recent direction of research has considered the problem of relating formally SCMs at different levels of abstraction, by defining maps between SCMs…

With the increasing adoption of predictive models trained using machine learning across a wide range of high-stakes applications, e.g., health care, security, criminal justice, finance, and education, there is a growing need for effective…

On-the-fly reasoning often requires adaptation to novel problems under limited data and distribution shift. This work introduces CausalARC: an experimental testbed for AI reasoning in low-data and out-of-distribution regimes, modeled after…

Structural causal models (SCMs) allow us to investigate complex systems at multiple levels of resolution. The causal abstraction (CA) framework formalizes the mapping between high- and low-level SCMs. We address CA learning in a challenging…