GO-CBED is a goal‑oriented Bayesian framework for sequential causal experimental design that directly maximizes expected information gain on user‑specified causal quantities, rather than inferring the full causal model. It employs a variational lower bound estimator optimized with a transformer‑based policy network and normalizing flow posteriors, enabling real‑time, non‑myopic decision making. Experiments on synthetic structural causal models and semi‑synthetic gene regulatory networks show that GO‑CBED consistently outperforms existing baselines, especially under limited experimental budgets and complex causal mechanisms.
arXiv:2607. 11508v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal discovery, the process of recovering underlying causal structures from observational data, is a fundamental pursuit across scientific disciplines.
arXiv:2512. 17629v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Prescriptive Process Monitoring (PresPM) recommends interventions during running business processes to optimize key performance indicators (KPIs).
The paper proposes a method to embed sequential Bayesian experimental design (BED) into large language models (LLMs) by training the models to reason about action selection using information-gain rewards. By specifying the experimental generative model separately from the LLM’s beliefs, the authors optimize expected information gain under a chosen model. Experiments on the Twenty Questions task show that the resulting policies outperform both inference- and training-time BED baselines while incurring lower computational costs, and the approach generalizes to unseen categories and transfers positively to the Medi-Q clinical dialogue benchmark.
arXiv:2609.24112v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal Bayesian Optimization (CBO) combines causal inference with Bayesian optimization to enable sample-efficient intervention selection in systems...
arXiv:2606. 01457v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bayesian optimization is a popular way to optimize expensive systems, where every experiment, simulation, or intervention costs time or money.
arXiv:2605. 15133v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Causal inference, estimating causal effects from observational data, is a fundamental tool in many disciplines.
arXiv:2510. 22298v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Uncovering the causal mechanisms of complex real-world systems remains a significant challenge, as these systems often entail high data collection costs and involve unknown interventions.
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.
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.
The paper introduces ACTION-BED, a Bayesian experimental design framework that replaces traditional uncertainty‑reduction objectives with expected future loss (EFL) on downstream actions. By reformulating EFLs into singly intractable objectives, ACTION-BED enables joint optimisation of design and action policies using stochastic gradients without explicit posterior or marginal likelihood estimation. This approach simplifies learning of design policies and allows easy customization to various downstream tasks and loss functions.
The paper introduces PICLE-PFN, a foundation model for longitudinal causal effect estimation that handles dynamic treatment policies. It represents policies via in-context history-decision demonstrations and is pretrained on synthetic data from longitudinal structural causal models, enabling it to predict conditional average potential outcomes in a single forward pass without task-specific training. Experiments on synthetic and semi-synthetic benchmarks show competitive RMSE and better uncertainty calibration while reducing deployment runtime compared to conventional estimators.
arXiv:2607. 03426v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning and world-knowledge capabilities, yet often struggle to gather information effectively across the multi-turn interactions required in sequential decision-making settings.