arXiv Machine Learning

Data-Poisoning Audits for Causal Effect Estimation

arXiv:2607. 19692v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Observational causal analyses increasingly pool records across sites, vendors, and collection systems, creating vulnerability to append-only attacks in which plausible records are strategically selected to alter a reported treatment effect.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

Learning Risk Scores Robust to Unobserved Confounders

The paper introduces a method for learning risk scores that remain reliable even when historical data contain unobserved confounders. By treating propensity weights as uncertain and applying sensitivity analysis with Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization, the authors formulate a robust learning problem solvable via an exponential cone program. Experiments on semi‑synthetic UCI data show the approach improves calibration by up to 29.2% over traditional benchmarks and 11.1% over the state of the art, without harming other performance metrics.

By Ryan Edmonds, Yingxiao Ye, Sina Aghaei, Andr\'es G\'omez, \c{C}a\u{g}{\i}l Ko\c{c}yi\u{g}it, Phebe Vayanos
arXiv AI
Aug 11

From Trajectories to Evidence: Auditable Experimental Records for Industrial Research Agents

arXiv:2608. 05235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Research agents increasingly conduct multi-round machine-learning experiments in industrial recommendation settings and retain the resulting trajectories to guide later decisions.

By Zijie Zhuang, Changxin Lao, Pengbo Xu, Hanwen Xu, Ruochen Yang, Yingzhi He, Peng Zhang, Jiangxia Cao, Yusheng Huang, Guohong Mu, Jian Liang, Ruiming Tang, Shuang Yang, Zhaojie Liu, Wenwu Ou, Kun Gai
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 17

Exposing the Illusion of Fairness: Auditing Vulnerabilities to Distributional Manipulation Attacks

arXiv:2507. 20708v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid deployment of AI systems in high-stakes domains, including those classified as high-risk under the The EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689), has intensified the need for reliable compliance auditing.

By Valentin Lafargue, Adriana Laurindo Monteiro, Emmanuelle Claeys, Laurent Risser, Jean-Michel Loubes
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

PUID: A Personalized Deconfounding Framework for Recommender Systems under Hidden Confounding

The paper introduces PUID, a Personalized Unobserved-Confounding-aware Interaction Deconfounder, designed to mitigate hidden confounding in recommender systems without relying on costly randomized controlled trials. PUID estimates user-item level sensitivity bounds using an entropy-based method that gauges the strength of hidden confounding from the mutual information between observed features and exposure status. An adversarial optimization strategy and a benchmark-guided variant (BPUID) further enhance robustness and predictive accuracy, and experiments on three real-world datasets show consistent outperformance over state-of-the-art baselines.

By Zongyu Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 15

Are Targeted Data Poisoning Attacks as Effective as We Think?

arXiv:2509.06896v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Targeted data poisoning attacks manipulate model predictions on specific test samples by injecting malicious data into training. Yet existing evalu...

By William Xu, Chenyu Zhang, Yihan Wang, Matthew Y. R. Yang, Zuoqiu Liu, Yaoliang Yu, Gautam Kamath, Yiwei Lu
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Causal Evidentiary Governance for High-Risk Machine Learning Systems

The paper proposes Causal Evidentiary Governance (CEG), a framework that requires regulated institutions to maintain a versioned directed acyclic graph (DAG) separating allowable from disallowed causal pathways in high‑risk machine learning systems. CEG introduces the Causal Harm Rate to quantify prediction variation due to disallowed pathways and pairs each decision with a signed Decision‑Evidence Packet (DEP) that cryptographically links the prediction to the DAG and path‑specific attributions, enabling efficient inclusion proofs via a Merkle tree. Empirical validation on synthetic credit data and the German Credit dataset demonstrates that CEG more clearly isolates causal effects than traditional fairness metrics and that a proof‑of‑concept implementation shows operational feasibility with manageable performance tradeoffs.

By Samah Kareem, Bar{\i}\c{s} \c{C}elikta\c{s}
arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago

CIDER-FM: Foundation Models for Causal Inference from Diverse Experimental Regimes

CIDER-FM is a causal foundation model that combines finite observational data with surrogate-interventional datasets to predict target conditional interventional distributions more accurately than using observational data alone. It employs an intervention-aware representation and hierarchical three‑axis attention to integrate information across variables, samples, and experimental regimes. Experiments on synthetic graphs, simulated data, and real‑world Causal Chambers data show that incorporating experimental context improves CID prediction performance.

By Yuche Gao, Arik Reuter, Siyuan Guo, Anish Dhir, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Adrian Weller