相关论文: Rethinking Software Empirical Studies with Structu…

Causal inference is a study of causal relationships between events and the statistical study of inferring these relationships through interventions and other statistical techniques. Causal reasoning is any line of work toward determining…

As any scientific discipline, the software engineering (SE) research community strives to contribute to the betterment of the target population of our research: software producers and consumers. We will only achieve this betterment if we…

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,…

Much of our experiments are designed to uncover the cause(s) and effect(s) behind a data generating mechanism (i.e., phenomenon) we happen to be interested in. Uncovering such relationships allows us to identify the true working of a…

The paper reviews methods that seek to draw causal inference from observational data and demonstrates how they can be applied to empirical problems in engineering research. It presents a framework for causal identification based on the…

From simulating galaxy formation to viral transmission in a pandemic, scientific models play a pivotal role in developing scientific theories and supporting government policy decisions that affect us all. Given these critical applications,…

There is abundant observational data in the software engineering domain, whereas running large-scale controlled experiments is often practically impossible. Thus, most empirical studies can only report statistical correlations -- instead of…

Causal learning has long concerned itself with the accurate recovery of underlying causal mechanisms. Such causal modelling enables better explanations of out-of-distribution data. Prior works on causal learning assume that the high-level…

Structural causal models are the basic modelling unit in Pearl's causal theory; in principle they allow us to solve counterfactuals, which are at the top rung of the ladder of causation. But they often contain latent variables that limit…

Linear structural causal models (SCMs) -- in which each observed variable is generated by a subset of the other observed variables as well as a subset of the exogenous sources -- are pervasive in causal inference and casual discovery.…

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…

This dissertation addresses achieving causal interpretability in Deep Learning for Software Engineering (DL4SE). While Neural Code Models (NCMs) show strong performance in automating software tasks, their lack of transparency in causal…

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…

This paper proposes a causal inference relation and causal programming as general frameworks for causal inference with structural causal models. A tuple, $\langle M, I, Q, F \rangle$, is an instance of the relation if a formula, $F$,…

One of the most common solutions adopted by software researchers to address code generation is by training Large Language Models (LLMs) on massive amounts of source code. Although a number of studies have shown that LLMs have been…

Causal Machine Learning (CausalML) is an umbrella term for machine learning methods that formalize the data-generation process as a structural causal model (SCM). This perspective enables us to reason about the effects of changes to this…

A vast amount of expert and domain knowledge is captured by causal structural priors, yet there has been little research on testing such priors for generalization and data synthesis purposes. We propose a novel model architecture, Causal…

Recent critiques of Physics Education Research (PER) studies have revoiced the critical issues when drawing causal inferences from observational data where no intervention is present. In response to a call for a "causal reasoning primer",…

The verification and validation of automated driving systems at SAE levels 4 and 5 is a multi-faceted challenge for which classical statistical considerations become infeasible. For this, contemporary approaches suggest a decomposition into…

Judea Pearl's vision of Structural Causal Models (SCMs) as engines for counterfactual reasoning hinges on faithful abduction: the precise inference of latent exogenous noise. For decades, operationalizing this step for complex, non-linear…