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Related papers: Transformer Is Inherently a Causal Learner

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Estimating counterfactual outcomes over time from observational data is relevant for many applications (e.g., personalized medicine). Yet, state-of-the-art methods build upon simple long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, thus rendering…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-06 Valentyn Melnychuk , Dennis Frauen , Stefan Feuerriegel

We study the concept of including the causality principle as regularizer into the solution of linear time-dependent inverse problems. This is achieved by combining transformer-based predictions with classical variational regularization,…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-03-23 Gesa Sarnighausen , Anne Wald , Andreas Hauptmann

A widely applied approach to causal inference from a non-experimental time series $X$, often referred to as "(linear) Granger causal analysis", is to regress present on past and interpret the regression matrix $\hat{B}$ causally. However,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-12-23 Philipp Geiger , Kun Zhang , Mingming Gong , Dominik Janzing , Bernhard Schölkopf

A structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) process is a linear causal model for variables that evolve over a discrete set of time points and between which there may be lagged and instantaneous effects. The qualitative causal structure of an…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-08-19 Nicolas-Domenic Reiter , Jonas Wahl , Andreas Gerhardus , Jakob Runge

This paper explores the potential of the transformer models for learning Granger causality in networks with complex nonlinear dynamics at every node, as in neurobiological and biophysical networks. Our study primarily focuses on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Ziyu Lu , Anika Tabassum , Shruti Kulkarni , Lu Mi , J. Nathan Kutz , Eric Shea-Brown , Seung-Hwan Lim

The remarkable capability of Transformers to do reasoning and few-shot learning, without any fine-tuning, is widely conjectured to stem from their ability to implicitly simulate a multi-step algorithms -- such as gradient descent -- with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Khashayar Gatmiry , Nikunj Saunshi , Sashank J. Reddi , Stefanie Jegelka , Sanjiv Kumar

In-context learning is a remarkable capability of transformers, referring to their ability to adapt to specific tasks based on a short history or context. Previous research has found that task-specific information is locally encoded within…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Liu Yang , Ziqian Lin , Kangwook Lee , Dimitris Papailiopoulos , Robert Nowak

Despite their success and widespread adoption, the opaque nature of deep neural networks (DNNs) continues to hinder trust, especially in critical applications. Current interpretability solutions often yield inconsistent or oversimplified…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Alec F. Diallo , Vaishak Belle , Paul Patras

Causality graphs are routinely estimated in social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering due to their capacity to efficiently represent the spatiotemporal structure of multivariate data sets in a format amenable for human…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-11-16 Bakht Zaman , Luis Miguel Lopez Ramos , Daniel Romero , Baltasar Beferull-Lozano

We propose to meta-learn causal structures based on how fast a learner adapts to new distributions arising from sparse distributional changes, e.g. due to interventions, actions of agents and other sources of non-stationarities. We show…

Transformers have the capacity to act as supervised learning algorithms: by properly encoding a set of labeled training ("in-context") examples and an unlabeled test example into an input sequence of vectors of the same dimension, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Spencer Frei , Gal Vardi

We propose a counterfactual approach to train ``causality-aware" predictive models that are able to leverage causal information in static anticausal machine learning tasks (i.e., prediction tasks where the outcome influences the features).…

Applications · Statistics 2020-12-01 Elias Chaibub Neto

Robotics has long been a field riddled with complex systems architectures whose modules and connections, whether traditional or learning-based, require significant human expertise and prior knowledge. Inspired by large pre-trained language…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Rogerio Bonatti , Sai Vemprala , Shuang Ma , Felipe Frujeri , Shuhang Chen , Ashish Kapoor

Transformers trained on huge text corpora exhibit a remarkable set of capabilities, e.g., performing basic arithmetic. Given the inherent compositional nature of language, one can expect the model to learn to compose these capabilities,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Rahul Ramesh , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Mikail Khona , Robert P. Dick , Hidenori Tanaka

Statistical learning relies upon data sampled from a distribution, and we usually do not care what actually generated it in the first place. From the point of view of causal modeling, the structure of each distribution is induced by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-11 Giambattista Parascandolo , Niki Kilbertus , Mateo Rojas-Carulla , Bernhard Schölkopf

Discovering causal structures with latent variables from observational data is a fundamental challenge in causal discovery. Existing methods often rely on constraint-based, iterative discrete searches, limiting their scalability to large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Parjanya Prashant , Ignavier Ng , Kun Zhang , Biwei Huang

The assumption of independence between observations (units) in a dataset is prevalent across various methodologies for learning causal graphical models. However, this assumption often finds itself in conflict with real-world data, posing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Alex Chen , Qing Zhou

Granger causality, commonly used for inferring causal structures from time series data, has been adopted in widespread applications across various fields due to its intuitive explainability and high compatibility with emerging deep neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Ziyi Zhang , Shaogang Ren , Xiaoning Qian , Nick Duffield

Identifying the causal structure of systems with multiple dynamic elements is critical to several scientific disciplines. The conventional approach is to conduct statistical tests of causality, for example with Granger Causality, between…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-22 Jacek P. Dmochowski

Real-world classification problems must contend with domain shift, the (potential) mismatch between the domain where a model is deployed and the domain(s) where the training data was gathered. Methods to handle such problems must specify…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Yibo Jiang , Victor Veitch