Performance Analysis: Overviews
Concomitant DAG Learning: On the Roles of Noise Adaptivity, Sparsity, and Non-negativity
Mateos, Gonzalo, Rey, Samuel, Ajorlou, Hamed, Tepper, Mariano
Directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) constitute a central modeling tool to enable principled reasoning about cause-effect interactions in complex systems. However, since the causal structure underlying a group of variables is often unknown and interventions may be infeasible or ethically challenging to implement, there is a need to address the task of inferring DAGs from observational data. However, most classical structure identification approaches face two key obstacles: the combinatorial challenge of enforcing acyclicity, which severely limits scalability, and identifiability challenges arising from latent confounding or heterogeneous noise. This tutorial offers an overview of recent signal processing and optimization advances that address these issues by recasting DAG structure learning as a continuous, score-based estimation problem over adjacency matrices. We begin with a didactic introduction to structural equation models and the formulation of causal graph recovery, followed by a historical survey of score-based methods ranging from early combinatorial search schemes and greedy heuristics to modern continuous frameworks that leverage smooth characterizations of acyclicity. Building on this foundation, we describe concomitant DAG estimation methods that jointly infer sparse causal structure and exogenous noise levels, improving robustness under heteroscedasticity and distribution shifts by rendering the estimator noise adaptive. All in all, the tutorial introduces readers to challenges and opportunities for signal processing research at the crossroads of causal inference, high-dimensional statistics, and scalable graph learning, while outlining emerging directions including online, nonlinear, and neural causal discovery.
Appendix
We provide concrete rules below for the two competition tracks that comprise DATACOMP: filtering and BYOD . Additionally, we provide a checklist, which encourages participants to specify design decisions, which allows for more granular comparison between submissions. A.1 Filtering track rules Participants can enter submissions for one or many different scales: small, medium, large or xlarge, which represent the raw number of image-text pairs in CommonPool that should be filtered. After choosing a scale, participants generate a list of uids, where each uid refers to a COMMONPOOL sample. The list of uids is used to recover image-text pairs from the pool, which is used for downstream CLIP training.
Testing Semantic Importance via Betting
Providing guarantees on the decision-making processes of autonomous systems, often based on complex black-box machine learning models, is paramount for their safe deployment. This need motivates efforts towards responsible artificial intelligence, which broadly entails questions of reliability, robustness, fairness, and interpretability.