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The pursuit of interpretable artificial intelligence has led to significant advancements in the development of methods that aim to explain the decision-making processes of complex models, such as deep learning systems. Among these methods,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Yihao Zhang

Distilling the thinking traces of a Large Language Model (LLM) with reasoning capabilities into a smaller model has been proven effective. Yet, there is a scarcity of work done on how model performances scale with the quantity of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Muyu He , Muhammad Ali Shafique , Anand Kumar , Tsach Mackey , Nazneen Rajani

Conversational Search (CS) involves retrieving relevant documents from a corpus while considering the conversational context, integrating retrieval with context modeling. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Simon Lupart , Mohammad Aliannejadi , Evangelos Kanoulas

Machine learning methods for estimating treatment effect heterogeneity promise greater flexibility than existing methods that test a few pre-specified hypotheses. However, one problem these methods can have is that it can be challenging to…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-08-05 Patrick Rehill

Complex systems can be modelled at various levels of detail. Ideally, causal models of the same system should be consistent with one another in the sense that they agree in their predictions of the effects of interventions. We formalise…

Causal learning is the cognitive process of developing the capability of making causal inferences based on available information, often guided by normative principles. This process is prone to errors and biases, such as the illusion of…

Structural Causal Explanations (SCEs) can be used to automatically generate explanations in natural language to questions about given data that are grounded in a (possibly learned) causal model. Unfortunately they work for small data only.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Sebastian Rödling , Matej Zečević , Devendra Singh Dhami , Kristian Kersting

In this work, we present sequence-driven structural causal models (SD-SCMs), a framework for specifying causal models with user-defined structure and language-model-defined mechanisms. We characterize how an SD-SCM enables sampling from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Lucius E. J. Bynum , Kyunghyun Cho

Large language models (LLMs) excel at reasoning tasks but are expensive to deploy. Thus small language models (SLMs) are fine-tuned on CoT data generated by LLMs to copy LLMs' abilities. However, these CoT data may include noisy rationales…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Hongyan Xie , Yitong Yao , Yikun Ban , Zixuan Huang , Deqing Wang , Zhenhe Wu , Haoxiang Su , Chao Wang , Shuangyong Song

Beneficial to advanced computing devices, models with massive parameters are increasingly employed to extract more information to enhance the precision in describing and predicting the patterns of objective systems. This phenomenon is…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Liye Jia , Fengyufan Yang , Ka Lok Man , Erick Purwanto , Sheng-Uei Guan , Jeremy Smith , Yutao Yue

Existing Causal-Why Video Question Answering (VideoQA) models often struggle with higher-order reasoning, relying on opaque, monolithic pipelines that entangle video understanding, causal inference, and answer generation. These black-box…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Paritosh Parmar , Eric Peh , Basura Fernando

Large language models can produce correct answers while relying on flawed reasoning traces, partly because common training objectives reward final-answer correctness rather than faithful intermediate reasoning. This undermines…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Sanjeda Akter , Ibne Farabi Shihab , Anuj Sharma

Recent reasoning methods (e.g., chain-of-thought, entailment reasoning) help users understand how language models (LMs) answer a single question, but they do little to reveal the LM's overall understanding, or "theory," about the question's…

In designing generative models, it is commonly believed that in order to learn useful latent structure, we face a fundamental tension between expressivity and structure. In this paper we challenge this view by proposing a new approach to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-03 Alex Markham , Isaac Hirsch , Jeri A. Chang , Liam Solus , Bryon Aragam

In this paper, we propose that small models may not need to absorb the cost of pre-training to reap its benefits. Instead, they can capitalize on the astonishing results achieved by modern, enormous models to a surprising degree. We observe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-06 Sean Farhat , Deming Chen

Despite surpassing human performance across mathematics, coding, and other knowledge-intensive tasks, large language models (LLMs) continue to struggle with causal reasoning. A core obstacle is the target data itself: causal systems are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Nicolás Astorga , Anita Kriz , Mihaela van der Schaar

We introduce CLEAR-3K, a dataset of 3,000 assertion-reasoning questions designed to evaluate whether language models can determine if one statement causally explains another. Each question present an assertion-reason pair and challenge…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Naiming Liu , Richard Baraniuk , Shashank Sonkar

Chain-of-thought (CoT) distillation aims to enhance small language models' (SLMs) reasoning by transferring multi-step reasoning capability from the larger teacher models. However, existing work underestimates rationale quality, focusing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Jianzhi Yan , Le Liu , Youcheng Pan , Shiwei Chen , Yang Xiang , Buzhou Tang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Lingjing Kong , Shaoan Xie , Guangyi Chen , Yuewen Sun , Xiangchen Song , Eric P. Xing , Kun Zhang

Drawing causal conclusions from observational data requires making assumptions about the true data-generating process. Causal inference research typically considers low-dimensional data, such as categorical or numerical fields in structured…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-02-11 Zach Wood-Doughty , Ilya Shpitser , Mark Dredze