arXiv Machine Learning By Xining Xun

Evidence-Type Competition: When Can Interventional Data Teach Language Models Causal Direction?

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

arXiv:2607. 29484v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interventional data is widely regarded as the gold standard for teaching models causal reasoning.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Machine Learning.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

Faithful Action-unit Causal Reasoning for Counterfactually Faithful Emotion Explanations

arXiv:2606. 15779v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal models can name the action units (AUs) behind a facial emotion, but their AU->emotion rationales are typically plausible rather than faithful: nothing forces the AUs a model invokes to be the AUs that actually drive its prediction.

By Van Thong Huynh, Hong Hai Nguyen, Thuy Pham, Trong Nghia Nguyen, Soo-Hyung Kim
arXiv AI
6d 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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 14

Resist and Update: Counterfactual Report Coordinates for Incentive-Compatible LLMs

Aligned language models routinely misreport under non-evidential incentive pressure: they agree with a confident user or overstate certainty even when their internal belief is unchanged. We cast this as a failure of internal incentive-compatibility (IC) and present a method for learning and certifying counterfactual report mediators that hold a model's reports to a causal contract: invariant to forbidden influences (pressure, prestige, restyling) and responsive to licensed ones (genuine evidence).

arXiv AI
Aug 26

From Causal Plausibility to Causal Reliability: Evaluating LLMs as Calibrated Direct Causal-Edge Classifiers

The study evaluates 12 instruction‑tuned open‑weight LLMs on six causal‑graph benchmarks, testing five prompting strategies and four confidence sources. Findings show that LLMs tend to over‑predict edges, misclassify indirect or reversed edges as direct, and exhibit high over‑confidence, while conventional confidence estimates are unreliable and agreement signals offer limited improvement. The results suggest LLMs should be used as externally validated soft causal priors rather than definitive causal‑structure evidence.

By Amit Kumar, Elnur Adl Zarabi, Suranjana Trivedy, Zhiqian Chen, Lei Zhang, Kaiqun Fu, Taoran Ji