The paper investigates why differentiable causal discovery methods that encode expert priors as forbidden-edge constraints via an Augmented Lagrangian (ALM) penalty—termed the "guide, not bind" approach—often fail. It identifies two key failures: (1) the sequential penalty‑ramping ALM suppresses a true edge before counterfactual checks can detect it, and the proposed adaptive relaxation rule DADU violates necessary conditions for safe relaxation, leading to a high failure rate across thousands of training runs; (2) the standard correlation‑matching objective inherently ties a true edge and its reverse to the same cost, whereas covariance matching can separate them by a provable margin. The authors provide theoretical propositions, corollaries, and empirical evidence to support these claims.
arXiv:2609.06941v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal effect estimation asks how an outcome would change under an intervention, and medicine, economics, and public policy all treat it as a foundatio...
arXiv:2607. 25532v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Consider a model trained at a single hospital to predict patient recovery, where the measured feature $X$ bundles the patient's true health signal ($C$) with a systematic artefact from that hospital's equipment ($S$).
arXiv:2606. 10934v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A common assumption holds that enough observational and interventional data, given to a strong enough predictor, suffices.
arXiv:2608. 02877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal discovery recovers directed structure from observational data and is increasingly used in clinical settings to support mechanism reasoning and fairness audits of predictive models.
arXiv:2604. 04535v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern machine learning systems, such as generative models and recommendation systems, often evolve through a cycle of deployment, user interaction, and periodic model updates.
Aligned language models routinely misreport under non-evidential incentive pressure: they agree with a confident user or overstate certainty even when their internal belief is unchanged. We cast this as a failure of internal incentive-compatibility (IC) and present a method for learning and certifying counterfactual report mediators that hold a model's reports to a causal contract: invariant to forbidden influences (pressure, prestige, restyling) and responsive to licensed ones (genuine evidence).
arXiv:2607. 12985v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aligned language models routinely misreport under non-evidential incentive pressure: they agree with a confident user or overstate certainty even when their internal belief is unchanged.
arXiv:2603. 12037v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Foundation models based on prior-data fitted networks (PFNs) have shown strong empirical performance in causal inference by framing the task as an in-context learning problem.
arXiv:2609.37667v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Counterfactual explanations for graph neural networks (GNNs) find the minimal intervention that flips a node's prediction--but computing one requires r...
arXiv:2602. 02470v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in many complex tasks, yet they can still fail in very simple logical reasoning such as the "reversal curse" -- when trained on forward knowledge data of the form "$A \rightarrow B$" (e.
arXiv:2605. 09169v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A Mamba state-space model trained only for next-step prediction appears to recover Granger-causal structure through a simple readout $S = |W_{out} W_{in}|$, with early experiments suggesting the phenomenon generalized across architectures and benefited from interventional data at $p < 10^{-5}$.
The paper establishes a theoretical bound on the cost of enforcing a physics prior in machine learning models, showing that the excess risk of a shape‑constrained hypothesis class is always bounded by the excess risk of an ablated model that ignores the prior. Empirical tests on an ordinal wildfire‑severity task confirm that a constrained model can never be outperformed by its own ablation, and that the cost of the prior is protocol‑dependent and can be quantified using a self‑calibrating floor. The authors also propose a two‑fit screening method to reject unidentifiable experiments before training a constrained model.