arXiv Machine Learning

Forecasting Associations, Not Interventions: A Preregistered Causal Audit of Covariate-Aware Time Series Foundation Models

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

DoTime: A Synthetic Benchmark Generator for Interventional and Counterfactual Time Series

arXiv:2607. 27263v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most benchmarks for causal inference over time series are observational, small, or domain-specific, leaving interventional and counterfactual estimation under-served exactly where it matters most, such as in healthcare, policy evaluation, and climate science.

By Dennis Thumm, Billy Tim Anthony, Ying Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 12

Market Impact Estimation via Causal Foundation Models

The paper introduces a Causal Market Simulator using a continuous‑time causal prior‑data fitted network (PFN) to estimate market impact, addressing bias from informational flow that traditional models overlook. On a synthetic market prior with adjustable confounding, the PFN matches an unbiased oracle while a naive estimator overestimates by up to 68%. In zero‑shot tests on real limit‑order books and equity data, the model’s intervention responses align with ground‑truth scales and improve correlation with measured impact when a recurrent state‑space variant is used.

By Dennis Thumm, Ying Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 1

The Intervention Gap in Latent World Models

The paper introduces the concept of intervention fidelity in latent world models, measuring whether a model’s open‑loop transitions align with actual environment interventions. Experiments on TD‑MPC2, Cheetah, and DreamerV3 show that high reward fit does not guarantee fidelity, and that self‑supervised models can outperform task‑anchored ones in preserving intervention effects. The authors propose a capture‑gated audit to localize failures and argue that fidelity must be directly audited on the model’s native interface.

By Donna Vakalis
arXiv AI
Jun 16

Prediction Bottlenecks Don't Discover Causal Structure (But Here's What They Actually Do)

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 $p < 10^{-5}$.

By Ankit Hemant Lade, Sai Krishna Jasti, Indar Kumar, Aman Chadha
arXiv AI
Oct 16

Human Interventions as Labels: Localizing, Steering, and (Sometimes) Editing the Computations Behind LLM Agent Failures

The paper treats human interventions during LLM agent failures as labels that pinpoint the internal computation that went wrong, rather than merely training data. In a controlled environment, the authors analyze one failure type—over‑asking a clarifying question when the request is already clear—using rule‑based overseer labels validated by blind human judgment. They find that the decision to ask versus act can be causally localized across several models, that over‑asking exhibits distinct mechanistic signatures, and that steering or weight consolidation can mitigate the issue, though outcomes vary by model family.

By Cesare Zavattari, Alessandro Tommasi, Giuseppe Prencipe
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 23

ACTIVA: Amortized Causal Effect Estimation via Variational Autoencoders

ACTIVA is a transformer‑based conditional variational autoencoder designed to estimate full interventional distributions from observational data without requiring interventional data, a causal graph, or per‑task fitting. It learns a conditional latent prior that amortizes causal knowledge across diverse training tasks, enabling a single forward pass to handle new causal models drawn from the training distribution. Empirical results on synthetic and biologically realistic gene‑expression simulations show that ACTIVA outperforms correlational baselines, reduces spurious non‑descendant effects, and matches strong amortized baselines, while also validating its theoretical mixture‑of‑distributions property on observationally equivalent models.

By Andreas Sauter, Saber Salehkaleybar, Frank van Harmelen, Aske Plaat, Erman Acar