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Causal representation learning (CRL) enhances machine learning models' robustness and generalizability by learning structural causal models associated with data-generating processes. We focus on a family of CRL methods that uses contrastive…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-17 Xiusi Li , Sékou-Oumar Kaba , Siamak Ravanbakhsh

Mechanistic interpretability aims to reverse engineer neural networks by uncovering which high-level algorithms they implement. Causal abstraction provides a precise notion of when a network implements an algorithm, i.e., a causal model of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Theodora-Mara Pîslar , Sara Magliacane , Atticus Geiger

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Gabriel Simmons

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-01-14 Vaishak Belle

Scientific models describe natural phenomena at different levels of abstraction. Abstract descriptions can provide the basis for interventions on the system and explanation of observed phenomena at a level of granularity that is coarser…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-07-02 Sander Beckers , Frederick Eberhardt , Joseph Y. Halpern

The mainstream of data-driven abstractive summarization models tends to explore the correlations rather than the causal relationships. Among such correlations, there can be spurious ones which suffer from the language prior learned from the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-25 Lu Chen , Ruqing Zhang , Wei Huang , Wei Chen , Jiafeng Guo , Xueqi Cheng

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,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-07-11 Sander Beckers , Joseph Y. Halpern

Recent work on causal abstraction, in particular graphical approaches focusing on causal structure between clusters of variables, aims to summarize a high-dimensional causal structure in terms of a low-dimensional one. Existing methods for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-12 Francisco Madaleno , Francisco C Pereira , Alex Markham

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Matej Zečević , Moritz Willig , Jonas Seng , Florian Peter Busch

Causal abstractions allow us to relate causal models on different levels of granularity. To ensure that the models agree on cause and effect, frameworks for causal abstractions define notions of consistency. Two distinct methods for causal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Willem Schooltink , Fabio Massimo Zennaro

Causal abstraction provides a theory describing how several causal models can represent the same system at different levels of detail. Existing theoretical proposals limit the analysis of abstract models to "hard" interventions fixing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Riccardo Massidda , Atticus Geiger , Thomas Icard , Davide Bacciu

Faithful evaluation of language model capabilities is crucial for deriving actionable insights that can inform model development. However, rigorous causal evaluations in this domain face significant methodological challenges, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Jikai Jin , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Sham Kakade , Hanlin Zhang

Causal discovery seeks to uncover causal relations from data, typically represented as causal graphs, and is essential for predicting the effects of interventions. While expert knowledge is required to construct principled causal graphs,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Zihao Li , Fabrizio Russo

We provide explicit, finite-sample guarantees for learning causal representations from data with a sublinear number of environments. Causal representation learning seeks to provide a rigourous foundation for the general representation…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-30 Inbeom Lee , Tongtong Jin , Bryon Aragam

Interventional causal models describe several joint distributions over some variables used to describe a system, one for each intervention setting. They provide a formal recipe for how to move between the different joint distributions and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-08-06 Eigil F. Rischel , Sebastian Weichwald

Reasoning requires going beyond pattern matching or memorization of solutions to identify and implement "algorithmic procedures" that can be used to deduce answers to hard problems. Doing so requires realizing the most relevant primitives,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Yuxiao Qu , Anikait Singh , Yoonho Lee , Amrith Setlur , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Chelsea Finn , Aviral Kumar

One of the central elements of any causal inference is an object called structural causal model (SCM), which represents a collection of mechanisms and exogenous sources of random variation of the system under investigation (Pearl, 2000). An…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-05 Kevin Xia , Kai-Zhan Lee , Yoshua Bengio , Elias Bareinboim

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Jacqueline Maasch , John Kalantari , Kia Khezeli

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with deductive judgment in syllogistic reasoning, systematically conflating semantic plausibility with formal validity a phenomenon known as content effect. This bias persists even when models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Gabriele Maraia , Marco Valentino , Fabio Massimo Zanzotto , Leonardo Ranaldi

Recent years have seen rapid progress at the intersection between causality and machine learning. Motivated by scientific applications involving high-dimensional data, in particular in biomedicine, we propose a deep neural architecture for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-12 Kai Lagemann , Christian Lagemann , Bernd Taschler , Sach Mukherjee