arXiv Machine Learning

Learning to Fluctuate: Statistical Foundations for Causal Tabular Pretraining

arXiv:2609. 26290v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal tabular foundation models amortize effect estimation across synthetic mechanisms, but latent-effect supervision rewards posterior shrinkage instead of directly encoding the repeated-sample response needed in a fixed deployment population.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

Matryoshka attribution: Learning to attribute language model outputs to representations and weights

Matryoshka Attribution (MAttr) is a mask‑learning method that identifies nested subsets of a language model’s internal components by minimizing downstream loss. It uses a differentiable sigmoid top‑k operator and randomizes sparsity during training to produce an attribution ordering of components. MAttr tops the Mechanistic Interpretability Benchmark leaderboard and can be applied via reinforcement learning to pinpoint weight changes that control behaviors such as refusal in Llama 3.1 8B Instruct, where restoring just 1% of weights removes refusals while preserving capabilities.

By Aryaman Arora, Kirill Acharya, Nathan Hu, Yanzhe Zhang, Noah Goodman, Dan Jurafsky, Christopher Potts
arXiv AI
3d ago

Causal Retention in Interactive Agents: Interface Factorization and Selective Adaptation

The paper introduces the concept of causal retention in interactive agents, examining whether a frozen learned state can correctly answer a mechanism‑probe map that is fixed independently of training. It shows that for finite structural causal models the optimal probe error is a Bayes decision risk, vanishing only when each learning‑interface fiber lies within a single probe‑answer fiber, and provides theoretical results such as a posterior‑coverage theorem and an exact edit decomposition. Experiments on finite causal systems, continuous simulators, TD‑MPC2, and Qwen2.5‑7B‑Instruct demonstrate that causal retention can be achieved with high accuracy, outperforming task‑performance‑based approaches.

By Shengjun Zhang, Tingyi Liu, Dong Xie, Yunlong Dong, Xiang Wang, Cheng Zeng
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

TabCausal: Pretraining Across Causal Environments for Tabular Causal Discovery

TabCausal is a causal discovery foundation model that learns to map datasets directly to causal graphs by pretraining across diverse causal environments. It uses a dynamic task construction strategy to expose the model to varied graph priors, mechanisms, noise models, dimensions, sample sizes, and intervention regimes, improving transferability from observational and mixed‑interventional data. On large synthetic benchmarks and a new protocol‑guided semantic benchmark, TabCausal outperforms many classical baselines and shows robust structure recovery, especially when interventional evidence is available.

By Zi-Rong Li, Si-Yang Liu, Tian-Zuo Wang, Han-Jia Ye
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

A Unified Framework for In-Context Learning with Causal and Masked Language Models

arXiv:2607. 04081v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a central capability of pretrained language models, yet its theoretical analysis has focused primarily on causal language models trained by left-to-right autoregressive prediction, such as GPT-style models.

By Chenrui Liu, Chuanlong Xie, Falong Tan, Yicheng Zeng, Lixing Zhu