Divyat Mahajan

Learning to Defer for Causal Discovery with Imperfect Experts

Oscar Clivio

Perouz Taslakian

Sara Magliacane

Valentina Zantedeschi

Integrating expert knowledge, e.g. from large language models, into causal discovery algorithms can be challenging when the knowledge is not… (see more) guaranteed to be correct. Expert recommendations may contradict data-driven results, and their reliability can vary significantly depending on the domain or specific query. Existing methods based on soft constraints or inconsistencies in predicted causal relationships fail to account for these variations in expertise. To remedy this, we propose L2D-CD, a method for gauging the correctness of expert recommendations and optimally combining them with data-driven causal discovery results. By adapting learning-to-defer (L2D) algorithms for pairwise causal discovery (CD), we learn a deferral function that selects whether to rely on classical causal discovery methods using numerical data or expert recommendations based on textual meta-data. We evaluate L2D-CD on the canonical Tübingen pairs dataset and demonstrate its superior performance compared to both the causal discovery method and the expert used in isolation. Moreover, our approach identifies domains where the expert's performance is strong or weak. Finally, we outline a strategy for generalizing this approach to causal discovery on graphs with more than two variables, paving the way for further research in this area.

2025-03-05

ICLR.cc/2025/Workshop/LLM_Reason_and_Plan (published)

Learning to Defer for Causal Discovery with Imperfect Experts

Oscar Clivio

Perouz Taslakian

Sara Magliacane

Valentina Zantedeschi

Integrating expert knowledge, e.g. from large language models, into causal discovery algorithms can be challenging when the knowledge is not… (see more) guaranteed to be correct. Expert recommendations may contradict data-driven results, and their reliability can vary significantly depending on the domain or specific query. Existing methods based on soft constraints or inconsistencies in predicted causal relationships fail to account for these variations in expertise. To remedy this, we propose L2D-CD, a method for gauging the correctness of expert recommendations and optimally combining them with data-driven causal discovery results. By adapting learning-to-defer (L2D) algorithms for pairwise causal discovery (CD), we learn a deferral function that selects whether to rely on classical causal discovery methods using numerical data or expert recommendations based on textual meta-data. We evaluate L2D-CD on the canonical Tübingen pairs dataset and demonstrate its superior performance compared to both the causal discovery method and the expert used in isolation. Moreover, our approach identifies domains where the expert's performance is strong or weak. Finally, we outline a strategy for generalizing this approach to causal discovery on graphs with more than two variables, paving the way for further research in this area.

2025-03-05

ICLR.cc/2025/Workshop/LLM_Reason_and_Plan (published)

Evaluating Interventional Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models

Tejas Kasetty

Gintare Karolina Dziugaite

Dhanya Sridhar

Numerous decision-making tasks require estimating causal effects under interventions on different parts of a system. As practitioners consid… (see more)er using large language models (LLMs) to automate decisions, studying their causal reasoning capabilities becomes crucial. A recent line of work evaluates LLMs ability to retrieve commonsense causal facts, but these evaluations do not sufficiently assess how LLMs reason about interventions. Motivated by the role that interventions play in causal inference, in this paper, we conduct empirical analyses to evaluate whether LLMs can accurately update their knowledge of a data-generating process in response to an intervention. We create benchmarks that span diverse causal graphs (e.g., confounding, mediation) and variable types, and enable a study of intervention-based reasoning. These benchmarks allow us to isolate the ability of LLMs to accurately predict changes resulting from their ability to memorize facts or find other shortcuts. Our analysis on four LLMs highlights that while GPT- 4 models show promising accuracy at predicting the intervention effects, they remain sensitive to distracting factors in the prompts.

2024-10-10

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/CALM (poster)

Evaluating Interventional Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models

Tejas Kasetty

Gintare Karolina Dziugaite

Dhanya Sridhar

Numerous decision-making tasks require estimating causal effects under interventions on different parts of a system. As practitioners consid… (see more)er using large language models (LLMs) to automate decisions, studying their causal reasoning capabilities becomes crucial. A recent line of work evaluates LLMs ability to retrieve commonsense causal facts, but these evaluations do not sufficiently assess how LLMs reason about interventions. Motivated by the role that interventions play in causal inference, in this paper, we conduct empirical analyses to evaluate whether LLMs can accurately update their knowledge of a data-generating process in response to an intervention. We create benchmarks that span diverse causal graphs (e.g., confounding, mediation) and variable types, and enable a study of intervention-based reasoning. These benchmarks allow us to isolate the ability of LLMs to accurately predict changes resulting from their ability to memorize facts or find other shortcuts. We evaluate six LLMs on the benchmarks, finding that GPT models show promising accuracy at predicting the intervention effects.

2024-04-08

ArXiv (preprint)

Evaluating Interventional Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models

Tejas Kasetty

Gintare Karolina Dziugaite

Dhanya Sridhar

Numerous decision-making tasks require estimating causal effects under interventions on different parts of a system. As practitioners consid… (see more)er using large language models (LLMs) to automate decisions, studying their causal reasoning capabilities becomes crucial. A recent line of work evaluates LLMs ability to retrieve commonsense causal facts, but these evaluations do not sufficiently assess how LLMs reason about interventions. Motivated by the role that interventions play in causal inference, in this paper, we conduct empirical analyses to evaluate whether LLMs can accurately update their knowledge of a data-generating process in response to an intervention. We create benchmarks that span diverse causal graphs (e.g., confounding, mediation) and variable types, and enable a study of intervention-based reasoning. These benchmarks allow us to isolate the ability of LLMs to accurately predict changes resulting from their ability to memorize facts or find other shortcuts. We evaluate six LLMs on the benchmarks, finding that GPT models show promising accuracy at predicting the intervention effects.

2024-04-08

ArXiv (preprint)

Empirical Analysis of Model Selection for Heterogeneous Causal Effect Estimation

Brady Neal

Vasilis Syrgkanis

2024-01-16

ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (spotlight)

Empirical Analysis of Model Selection for Heterogenous Causal Effect Estimation

Brady Neal

Vasilis Syrgkanis

We study the problem of model selection in causal inference, specifically for the case of conditional average treatment effect (CATE) estima… (see more)tion under binary treatments. Unlike model selection in machine learning, there is no perfect analogue of cross-validation as we do not observe the counterfactual potential outcome for any data point. Towards this, there have been a variety of proxy metrics proposed in the literature, that depend on auxiliary nuisance models estimated from the observed data (propensity score model, outcome regression model). However, the effectiveness of these metrics has only been studied on synthetic datasets as we can access the counterfactual data for them. We conduct an extensive empirical analysis to judge the performance of these metrics introduced in the literature, and novel ones introduced in this work, where we utilize the latest advances in generative modeling to incorporate multiple realistic datasets. Our analysis suggests novel model selection strategies based on careful hyperparameter tuning of CATE estimators and causal ensembling.

2024-01-01

ICLR (published)

Additive Decoders for Latent Variables Identification and Cartesian-Product Extrapolation

We tackle the problems of latent variables identification and "out-of-support'' image generation in representation learning. We show that bo… (see more)th are possible for a class of decoders that we call additive, which are reminiscent of decoders used for object-centric representation learning (OCRL) and well suited for images that can be decomposed as a sum of object-specific images. We provide conditions under which exactly solving the reconstruction problem using an additive decoder is guaranteed to identify the blocks of latent variables up to permutation and block-wise invertible transformations. This guarantee relies only on very weak assumptions about the distribution of the latent factors, which might present statistical dependencies and have an almost arbitrarily shaped support. Our result provides a new setting where nonlinear independent component analysis (ICA) is possible and adds to our theoretical understanding of OCRL methods. We also show theoretically that additive decoders can generate novel images by recombining observed factors of variations in novel ways, an ability we refer to as Cartesian-product extrapolation. We show empirically that additivity is crucial for both identifiability and extrapolation on simulated data.

Additive Decoders for Latent Variables Identification and Cartesian-Product Extrapolation

We tackle the problems of latent variables identification and ``out-of-support'' image generation in representation learning. We show that b… (see more)oth are possible for a class of decoders that we call additive, which are reminiscent of decoders used for object-centric representation learning (OCRL) and well suited for images that can be decomposed as a sum of object-specific images. We provide conditions under which exactly solving the reconstruction problem using an additive decoder is guaranteed to identify the blocks of latent variables up to permutation and block-wise invertible transformations. This guarantee relies only on very weak assumptions about the distribution of the latent factors, which might present statistical dependencies and have an almost arbitrarily shaped support. Our result provides a new setting where nonlinear independent component analysis (ICA) is possible and adds to our theoretical understanding of OCRL methods. We also show theoretically that additive decoders can generate novel images by recombining observed factors of variations in novel ways, an ability we refer to as Cartesian-product extrapolation. We show empirically that additivity is crucial for both identifiability and extrapolation on simulated data.

2023-07-05

ArXiv (preprint)

Interventional Causal Representation Learning

Kartik Ahuja

Yixin Wang

Yoshua Bengio

Causal representation learning seeks to extract high-level latent factors from low-level sensory data. Most existing methods rely on observa… (see more)tional data and structural assumptions (e.g., conditional independence) to identify the latent factors. However, interventional data is prevalent across applications. Can interventional data facilitate causal representation learning? We explore this question in this paper. The key observation is that interventional data often carries geometric signatures of the latent factors' support (i.e. what values each latent can possibly take). For example, when the latent factors are causally connected, interventions can break the dependency between the intervened latents' support and their ancestors'. Leveraging this fact, we prove that the latent causal factors can be identified up to permutation and scaling given data from perfect

2023-04-24

ICML.cc/2023/Conference (poster)

Synergies between Disentanglement and Sparsity: Generalization and Identifiability in Multi-Task Learning

Although disentangled representations are often said to be beneficial for downstream tasks, current empirical and theoretical understanding … (see more)is limited. In this work, we provide evidence that disentangled representations coupled with sparse base-predictors improve generalization. In the context of multi-task learning, we prove a new identifiability result that provides conditions under which maximally sparse base-predictors yield disentangled representations. Motivated by this theoretical result, we propose a practical approach to learn disentangled representations based on a sparsity-promoting bi-level optimization problem. Finally, we explore a meta-learning version of this algorithm based on group Lasso multiclass SVM base-predictors, for which we derive a tractable dual formulation. It obtains competitive results on standard few-shot classification benchmarks, while each task is using only a fraction of the learned representations.

2023-01-01

ICML (published)