Related papers: Controllable User Simulation
Mathematical models are fundamental building blocks in the design of dynamical control systems. As control systems are becoming increasingly complex and networked, approaches for obtaining such models based on first principles reach their…
Regulators and academics are increasingly interested in the causal effect that algorithmic actions of a digital platform have on consumption. We introduce a general causal inference problem we call the steerability of consumption that…
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…
This study introduces a data-driven, machine learning-based method to detect suitable control variables and instruments for assessing the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in observational data. Our approach tests the joint…
In settings where Machine Learning (ML) algorithms automate or inform consequential decisions about people, individual decision subjects are often incentivized to strategically modify their observable attributes to receive more favorable…
Behavioral cloning reduces policy learning to supervised learning by training a discriminative model to predict expert actions given observations. Such discriminative models are non-causal: the training procedure is unaware of the causal…
While LLMs exhibit impressive fluency and factual recall, they struggle with robust causal reasoning, often relying on spurious correlations and brittle patterns. Similarly, traditional Reinforcement Learning agents also lack causal…
Deep learning has revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence. Based on the statistical correlations uncovered by deep learning-based methods, computer vision has contributed to tremendous growth in areas like autonomous driving and…
Instruction tuning on a mixture of tasks has improved zero-shot capabilities in natural language processing (NLP). Nevertheless, existing methods often learn features that exhibit correlations between instruction-formatted samples and…
In strategic classification, an institution (e.g., a bank) anticipates adaptation from users who change their features to increase utility in a classification task (e.g., loan repayment). Since a key challenge is the distribution shift…
Externally controlled trials (ECTs) are increasingly used when randomized controls are infeasible, unethical, or insufficient, including applications in rare diseases, oncology, pediatrics, and post-approval effectiveness research. Although…
Machine learning components are now central to AI-infused software systems, from recommendations and code assistants to clinical decision support. As regulations and governance frameworks increasingly require deleting sensitive data from…
Although review papers on causal inference methods are now available, there is a lack of introductory overviews on what they can render and on the guiding criteria for choosing one particular method. This tutorial gives an overview in…
We study the problem of deriving policies, or rules, that when enacted on a complex system, cause a desired outcome. Absent the ability to perform controlled experiments, such rules have to be inferred from past observations of the system's…
Modeling spatial-temporal interactions among neighboring agents is at the heart of multi-agent problems such as motion forecasting and crowd navigation. Despite notable progress, it remains unclear to which extent modern representations can…
Software engineering increasingly involves making high-stakes decisions under uncertainty, using signals from code, field data, and socio-technical processes. Recent AI-driven support (e.g., anomaly detection, predictive analytics, AIOps,…
Off-Policy reinforcement learning has been a driving force for the state-of-the-art conversational AIs leading to more natural humanagent interactions and improving the user satisfaction for goal-oriented agents. However, in large-scale…
Causal approaches to post-hoc explainability for black-box prediction models (e.g., deep neural networks trained on image pixel data) have become increasingly popular. However, existing approaches have two important shortcomings: (i) the…
Method validation and study design in causal inference rely on synthetic data with known counterfactuals. Existing simulators trade off distributional realism, the ability to capture mixed-type and multimodal tabular data, against causal…
We formalize a structural property of the causal (autoregressive) language modeling (CLM) objective: reversal invariance. Formally, the next-token prediction loss assigns identical likelihood to a corpus and its reversal, implying that…