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

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

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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 $p < 10^{-5}$.

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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
Sep 4

Guide, Not Bind: Why Defeasible Priors Fail in Augmented Lagrangian Causal Discovery

The paper investigates why differentiable causal discovery methods that encode expert priors as forbidden-edge constraints via an Augmented Lagrangian (ALM) penalty—termed the "guide, not bind" approach—often fail. It identifies two key failures: (1) the sequential penalty‑ramping ALM suppresses a true edge before counterfactual checks can detect it, and the proposed adaptive relaxation rule DADU violates necessary conditions for safe relaxation, leading to a high failure rate across thousands of training runs; (2) the standard correlation‑matching objective inherently ties a true edge and its reverse to the same cost, whereas covariance matching can separate them by a provable margin. The authors provide theoretical propositions, corollaries, and empirical evidence to support these claims.

By Sairam Sundararaman, Sara Girdhar, Manit Narasimha Murthy, Samrudh N, Bhaskarjyoti Das