Related papers: Counterfactual Influence in Markov Decision Proces…
Many empirical studies estimate causal effects in environments where economic units interact through spatial or network connections. In such settings, outcomes are jointly determined, and treatment induced shocks propagate across…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), the mathematical framework underlying most algorithms in Reinforcement Learning (RL), are often used in a way that wrongfully assumes that the state of an agent's environment does not change during action…
Work in Counterfactual Explanations tends to focus on the principle of "the closest possible world" that identifies small changes leading to the desired outcome. In this paper we argue that while this approach might initially seem…
An optimal feedback controller for a given Markov decision process (MDP) can in principle be synthesized by value or policy iteration. However, if the system dynamics and the reward function are unknown, a learning agent must discover an…
Counterfactual reasoning -- envisioning hypothetical scenarios, or possible worlds, where some circumstances are different from what (f)actually occurred (counter-to-fact) -- is ubiquitous in human cognition. Conventionally,…
We study the problem of synthesizing a policy that maximizes the entropy of a Markov decision process (MDP) subject to a temporal logic constraint. Such a policy minimizes the predictability of the paths it generates, or dually, maximizes…
We consider the task of counterfactual estimation from observational imaging data given a known causal structure. In particular, quantifying the causal effect of interventions for high-dimensional data with neural networks remains an open…
We develop a regression based primal-dual martingale approach for solving finite time horizon MDPs with general state and action space. As a result, our method allows for the construction of tight upper and lower biased approximations of…
Machine learning models based on temporal point processes are the state of the art in a wide variety of applications involving discrete events in continuous time. However, these models lack the ability to answer counterfactual questions,…
We address the problem of integrating data from multiple, possibly biased, observational and interventional studies, to eventually compute counterfactuals in structural causal models. We start from the case of a single observational dataset…
We consider Markov decision processes (MDPs) in which the transition probabilities and rewards belong to an uncertainty set parametrized by a collection of random variables. The probability distributions for these random parameters are…
This paper is concerned with constructing a confidence interval for a target policy's value offline based on a pre-collected observational data in infinite horizon settings. Most of the existing works assume no unmeasured variables exist…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the defacto frame-work for sequential decision making in the presence ofstochastic uncertainty. A classical optimization criterion forMDPs is to maximize the expected discounted-sum pay-off, which…
Understanding and manipulating the causal generation mechanisms in language models is essential for controlling their behavior. Previous work has primarily relied on techniques such as representation surgery -- e.g., model ablations or…
We hypothesize that optimal system responses emerge from adaptive strategies grounded in causal and counterfactual knowledge. Counterfactual inference allows us to create hypothetical scenarios to examine the effects of alternative system…
Mediation analysis serves as a crucial tool to obtain causal inference based on directed acyclic graphs, which has been widely employed in the areas of biomedical science, social science, epidemiology and psychology. Decomposition of total…
We address the common yet often-overlooked selection bias in interventional studies, where subjects are selectively enrolled into experiments. For instance, participants in a drug trial are usually patients of the relevant disease; A/B…
Counterfactual explanations are viewed as an effective way to explain machine learning predictions. This interest is reflected by a relatively young literature with already dozens of algorithms aiming to generate such explanations. These…
Recent decision-making systems are increasingly complicated, making it crucial to verify and understand their behavior for a given specification. A promising approach is to comprehensively explain undesired behavior in the systems modeled…
We study counterfactual regression, which aims to map input features to outcomes under hypothetical scenarios that differ from those observed in the data. This is particularly useful for decision-making when adapting to sudden shifts in…