arXiv Machine Learning

Wasserstein Causal Forests for Distribution-Valued Outcomes

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 18

Preference Is Not Intervention: The Structure and Stability Boundaries of Reader-Specific Evidence Utility

The paper investigates whether reader-specific differences in retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) reflect reusable structure or merely input‑local interactions. By fixing query, evidence, task, scoring, and intervention, the authors find that nine readers disagree on the effect sign in 33% of cases, with reader×query interactions explaining 29.8% of utility variance. They further decompose heterogeneity into evidence activity, ordinal preference, and conditional signed direction, discovering that ordinal reader geometry is stable across multiple settings while signed geometry is task‑bounded, yet stable ordinal similarity does not predict cross‑reader intervention transfer.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

Conditional Distributional Treatment Effects: Doubly Robust Estimation and Testing

The paper introduces a new estimand for conditional distributional treatment effects that captures how treatments influence the entire outcome distribution, including variance and tail risks, in a covariate-dependent manner. It presents a doubly robust estimator that is minimax optimal locally and uses it to construct a test for global homogeneity of conditional potential outcome distributions. The test accommodates discrepancies beyond the maximum mean discrepancy, guarantees valid type‑1 error, is consistent against fixed alternatives, and includes a computationally efficient, permutation‑free algorithm with exact closed‑form expressions for two natural discrepancies.

By Saksham Jain, Alex Luedtke
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

When Post-Processing Fairness Constraints Help and When They Harm: Evidence from Eight Cross-Domain Evaluations

The paper introduces FAPE, a four‑stage framework for evaluating the post‑processing fairness intervention ThresholdOptimizer across eight diverse domains, including criminal justice, finance, healthcare, and education. It reports that the intervention reduces disparity in most high‑disparity cases but can worsen fairness when baseline disparities are low, and that a single deployment‑time audit is unreliable without continuous monitoring and baseline‑disparity screening.

By Nithin Raghava Ramachandra Narla
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

Distributional Causal Mediation via Conditional Generative Modeling

arXiv:2605. 01765v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mediation analysis has traditionally focused on outcome-level summary contrasts, such as mean effects, which may obscure substantial distributional changes induced by complex and nonlinear causal mechanisms.

By Jinlun Zhang, Haoneng Huang, Zishu Zhan, Chunquan Ou