arXiv Machine Learning By Gabe Schulman, Lucius E. J. Bynum, Yoav Wald

Unit-level aggregation breaks coverage in causal foundation models

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The paper investigates why causal foundation models (CFMs) produce poorly calibrated credible intervals when aggregating unit-level estimates over groups. It shows that CFMs combine unit-level variances assuming independence, but posterior uncertainty induces correlations that shrink the combined variance, leading to coverage loss that worsens with group size. The authors demonstrate that neural process models, which jointly predict for groups, correct this bias and markedly improve interval coverage across synthetic and benchmark datasets.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 2

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.

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