Related papers: Controllable User Simulation

Causal understanding is essential for many kinds of decision-making, but causal inference from observational data has typically only been applied to structured, low-dimensional datasets. While text classifiers produce low-dimensional…

We propose an architecture for training generative models of counterfactual conditionals of the form, 'can we modify event A to cause B instead of C?', motivated by applications in robot control. Using an 'adversarial training' paradigm, an…

Imitation learning, which learns agent policy by mimicking expert demonstration, has shown promising results in many applications such as medical treatment regimes and self-driving vehicles. However, it remains a difficult task to interpret…

Using observed language to understand interpersonal interactions is important in high-stakes decision making. We propose a causal research design for observational (non-experimental) data to estimate the natural direct and indirect effects…

We study offline imitation learning (IL) when part of the decision-relevant state is observed only through noisy measurements and the distribution may change between training and deployment. Such settings induce spurious state-action…

Adapting to latent confounded shift remains a core challenge in modern AI. This setting is driven by hidden variables that induce spurious correlations between inputs and outputs during training, leading models to rely on non-causal…

Structural causal models postulate noisy functional relations among a set of interacting variables. The causal structure underlying each such model is naturally represented by a directed graph whose edges indicate for each variable which…

User simulation is an emerging interdisciplinary topic with multiple critical applications in the era of Generative AI. It involves creating an intelligent agent that mimics the actions of a human user interacting with an AI system,…

Learning-based autonomous driving systems are trained mostly on incident-free data, offering little guidance near safety-performance boundaries. Real crash reports contain precisely the contrastive evidence needed, but they are hard to use:…

Causal inference is a statistical paradigm for quantifying causal effects using observational data. It is a complex process, requiring multiple steps, iterations, and collaborations with domain experts. Analysts often rely on visualizations…

Understanding predictions made by deep neural networks is notoriously difficult, but also crucial to their dissemination. As all machine learning based methods, they are as good as their training data, and can also capture unwanted biases.…

Decision analysis deals with modeling and enhancing decision processes. A principal challenge in improving behavior is in obtaining a transparent description of existing behavior in the first place. In this paper, we develop an expressive,…

Imitation learning trains control policies by mimicking pre-recorded expert demonstrations. In partially observable settings, imitation policies must rely on observation histories, but many seemingly paradoxical results show better…

Software systems with large parameter spaces, nondeterminism and high computational cost are challenging to test. Recently, software testing techniques based on causal inference have been successfully applied to systems that exhibit such…

Imitation learning from demonstrations usually suffers from the confounding effects of unmeasured variables (i.e., unmeasured confounders) on the states and actions. If ignoring them, a biased estimation of the policy would be entailed. To…

Consider the finite state graph that results from a simple, discrete, dynamical system in which an agent moves in a rectangular grid picking up and dropping packages. Can the state variables of the problem, namely, the agent location and…

Recent theoretical work in causal inference has explored an important class of variables which, when conditioned on, may further amplify existing unmeasured confounding bias (bias amplification). Despite this theoretical work, existing…

Understanding the causal effects of text on downstream outcomes is a central task in many applications. Estimating such effects requires researchers to run controlled experiments that systematically vary textual features. While large…

Formal language techniques have been used in the past to study autonomous dynamical systems. However, for controlled systems, new features are needed to distinguish between information generated by the system and input control. We show how…

Proactive task-oriented dialogue (TOD), such as outbound sales, demands a persuasive agent that actively probes the user's concerns and steers the conversation toward acceptance within a bounded number of turns. Yet post-trained LLMs are…