Related papers: Exploiting Causal Graph Priors with Posterior Samp…

We consider the incorporation of causal knowledge about the presence or absence of (possibly indirect) causal relations into a causal model. Such causal relations correspond to directed paths in a causal model. This type of knowledge…

Classic Bayesian methods with complex models are frequently infeasible due to an intractable likelihood. Simulation-based inference methods, such as Approximate Bayesian Computing (ABC), calculate posteriors without accessing a likelihood…

In real-world Bayesian inference applications, prior assumptions regarding the parameters of interest may be unrepresentative of their actual values for a given dataset. In particular, if the likelihood is concentrated far out in the wings…

Causal structure learning (CSL), a prominent technique for encoding cause-and-effect relationships among variables, through Bayesian Networks (BNs). Although recovering causal structure solely from data is a challenge, the integration of…

We study a posterior sampling approach to efficient exploration in constrained reinforcement learning. Alternatively to existing algorithms, we propose two simple algorithms that are more efficient statistically, simpler to implement and…

Priors in Bayesian analyses often encode informative domain knowledge that can be useful in making the inference process more efficient. Occasionally, however, priors may be unrepresentative of the parameter values for a given dataset,…

Statistical machine learning algorithms have achieved state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets, outperforming humans in many tasks. However, the out-of-distribution data and confounder, which have an unpredictable causal relationship,…

Bayesian inference for inverse problems hinges critically on the choice of priors. In the absence of specific prior information, population-level distributions can serve as effective priors for parameters of interest. With the advent of…

Causal reasoning and discovery, two fundamental tasks of causal analysis, often face challenges in applications due to the complexity, noisiness, and high-dimensionality of real-world data. Despite recent progress in identifying latent…

We propose a probabilistic framework to directly insert prior knowledge in reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms by defining the behaviour policy as a Bayesian posterior distribution. Such a posterior combines task specific information…

A vast amount of expert and domain knowledge is captured by causal structural priors, yet there has been little research on testing such priors for generalization and data synthesis purposes. We propose a novel model architecture, Causal…

Causality is receiving increasing attention by the artificial intelligence and machine learning communities. This paper gives an example of modelling a recommender system problem using causal graphs. Specifically, we approached the causal…

We consider the problem of online reinforcement learning for the Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem modeled as an unknown MDP with an absorbing state. We propose PSRL-SSP, a simple posterior sampling-based reinforcement learning…

Machine learning models achieve state-of-the-art performance on many supervised learning tasks. However, prior evidence suggests that these models may learn to rely on shortcut biases or spurious correlations (intuitively, correlations that…

Causal discovery can be a powerful tool for investigating causality when a system can be observed but is inaccessible to experiments in practice. Despite this, it is rarely used in any scientific or medical fields. One of the major hurdles…

Exploration and credit assignment under sparse rewards are still challenging problems. We argue that these challenges arise in part due to the intrinsic rigidity of operating at the level of actions. Actions can precisely define how to…

We present a constraint-based algorithm for learning causal structures from observational time-series data, in the presence of latent confounders. We assume a discrete-time, stationary structural vector autoregressive process, with both…

In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) promises fast adaptation to unseen environments without parameter updates, but current methods either cannot improve beyond the training distribution or require near-optimal data, limiting practical…

Estimating causal quantities traditionally relies on bespoke estimators tailored to specific assumptions. Recently proposed Causal Foundation Models (CFMs) promise a more unified approach by amortising causal discovery and inference in a…

Causal Disentangled Representation Learning(CDRL) aims to learn and disentangle low dimensional representations and their underlying causal structure from observations. However, existing disentanglement methods rely on a standard mean-field…