Egocentric Referring Video Object Segmentation (Ego-RVOS) aims to segment the specific object actively involved in a human action, as described by a language query, within first-person videos. This task is critical for understanding egocentric human behavior. However, achieving such segmentation robustly is challenging due to ambiguities inherent in egocentric videos and biases present in training data. Consequently, existing methods often struggle, learning spurious correlations from skewed object-action pairings in datasets and fundamental visual confounding factors of the egocentric perspective, such as rapid motion and frequent occlusions. To address these limitations, we introduce Causal Ego-REferring Segmentation (CERES), a plug-in causal framework that adapts strong, pre-trained RVOS backbones to the egocentric domain. CERES implements dual-modal causal intervention: applying backdoor adjustment principles to counteract language representation biases learned from dataset statistics, and leveraging front-door adjustment concepts to address visual confounding by intelligently integrating semantic visual features with geometric depth information guided by causal principles, creating representations more robust to egocentric distortions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CERES achieves state-of-the-art performance on Ego-RVOS benchmarks, highlighting the potential of applying causal reasoning to build more reliable models for broader egocentric video understanding.

In real world, the observed label distribution of a dataset often mismatches its true distribution due to noisy labels. In this situation, noisy labels learning (NLL) methods directly integrated with long-tailed learning (LTL) methods tend to fail due to a dilemma: NLL methods normally rely on unbiased model predictions to recover true distribution by selecting and correcting noisy labels; while LTL methods like logit adjustment depends on true distributions to adjust biased predictions, leading to a deadlock of mutual dependency defined in this paper. To address this, we propose Unlocker, a bilevel optimization framework that integrates NLL methods and LTL methods to iteratively disentangle this deadlock. The inner optimization leverages NLL to train the model, incorporating LTL methods to fairly select and correct noisy labels. The outer optimization adaptively determines an adjustment strength, mitigating model bias from over-or under-adjustment. We also theoretically prove that this bilevel optimization problem is convergent by transferring the outer optimization target to an equivalent problem with a closed-form solution. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in alleviating model bias and handling long-tailed noisy label data. Code is available at https://github.com/ChenShu248/Unlocker.

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to understand people's minds based on their behavior, is key to developing socially intelligent agents. Current approaches to ToM reasoning either rely on prompting Large Language Models (LLMs), which are prone to systematic errors, or use handcrafted, rigid agent models for model-based inference, which are more robust but fail to generalize across domains. In this work, we introduce AutoToM, an automated agent modeling method for scalable, robust, and interpretable mental inference. Given a ToM problem, AutoToM first proposes an initial agent model and then performs automated Bayesian inverse planning based on this model, leveraging an LLM backend.

Extensive experiments show that GenColor produces visually compelling results comparable to those of expert colorists and surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both subjective and objective evaluations. We have released the code and dataset.

The weighted controlled direct effect (WCDE) generalizes the standard controlled direct effect (CDE) by averaging over the mediator distribution, providing a robust estimate when treatment effects vary across mediator levels. This makes the WCDE especially relevant in fairness analysis, where it isolates the direct effect of an exposure on an outcome, independent of mediating pathways. This work establishes three fundamental advances for WCDE in observational studies: First, we establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the identifiability of the WCDE, clarifying when it diverges from the CDE. Next, we consider nonparametric estimation of the WCDE and derive its influence function, focusing on the class of regular and asymptotically linear estimators. Lastly, we characterize the optimal covariate adjustment set that minimizes the asymptotic variance, demonstrating how mediator-confounder interactions introduce distinct requirements compared to average treatment effect (ATE) estimation. Using synthetic and real-world data, we validate our theory numerically, showing that the proposed optimal valid adjustment set yields the lowest variance at practical sample sizes. Our results offer a principled framework for efficient estimation of direct effects in complex causal systems, with practical applications in fairness and mediation analysis.

Learning rate is widely regarded as crucial for effective foundation model pretraining. Recent research explores and demonstrates the transferability of learning rate configurations across varying model and dataset sizes, etc. Nevertheless, these approaches are constrained to specific training scenarios and typically necessitate extensive hyperparameter tuning on proxy models. In this work, we propose AdaLRS, a plug-in-and-play adaptive learning rate search algorithm that conducts online optimal learning rate search via optimizing loss descent velocities. We provide theoretical and experimental analyzes to show that foundation model pretraining loss and its descent velocity are both convex and share the same optimal learning rate. Relying solely on training loss dynamics, AdaLRS involves few extra computations to guide the search process, and its convergence is guaranteed via theoretical analysis. Experiments on both LLM and VLM pretraining show that AdaLRS adjusts suboptimal learning rates to the neighborhood of optimum with marked efficiency and effectiveness, with model performance improved accordingly. We also show the robust generalizability of AdaLRS across varying training scenarios, such as different model sizes, training paradigms, base learning rate scheduler choices, and hyperparameter settings.

We study the estimation of distributional treatment effects in randomized experiments with imperfect compliance. When participants do not adhere to their assigned treatments, we leverage treatment assignment as an instrumental variable to identify the local distributional treatment effect--the difference in outcome distributions between treatment and control groups for the subpopulation of compliers. We propose a regression-adjusted estimator based on a distribution regression framework with Neyman-orthogonal moment conditions, enabling robustness and flexibility with high-dimensional covariates. Our approach accommodates continuous, discrete, and mixed discrete-continuous outcomes, and applies under a broad class of covariate-adaptive randomization schemes, including stratified block designs and simple random sampling. We derive the estimator's asymptotic distribution and show that it achieves the semiparametric efficiency bound. Simulation results demonstrate favorable finite-sample performance, and we demonstrate the method's practical relevance in an application to the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment.

Estimating causal effects from nonexperimental data is a fundamental problem in many fields of science. A key component of this task is selecting an appropriate set of covariates for confounding adjustment to avoid bias. Most existing methods for covariate selection often assume the absence of latent variables and rely on learning the global causal structure among variables. However, identifying the global structure can be unnecessary and inefficient, especially when our primary interest lies in estimating the effect of a treatment variable on an outcome variable. To address this limitation, we propose a novel local learning approach for covariate selection in nonparametric causal effect estimation, which accounts for the presence of latent variables. Our approach leverages testable independence and dependence relationships among observed variables to identify a valid adjustment set for a target causal relationship, ensuring both soundness and completeness under standard assumptions.

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We study the problem of selecting covariates for unbiased estimation of the total causal effect.Existing approaches typically rely on global causal structure learning over all variables, or on strong assumptions such as causal sufficiency - where observed variables share no latent confounders - or the pretreatment assumption, which limits covariates to those unaffected by the treatment or outcome. These requirements are often unrealistic in practice, and global learning becomes computationally prohibitive in high-dimensional settings.To address these challenges, we propose a novel local learning method for covariate selection in nonparametric causal effect estimation that avoids both the pretreatment and causal sufficiency assumptions. We first characterize a local boundary that contains at least one valid adjustment set whenever one exists for identifying the causal effect, and then develop local identification procedures to efficiently search within this boundary.We prove that the proposed method is sound and complete. Experiments on multiple synthetic datasets and two real-world datasets show that our approach achieves accurate causal effect estimation while substantially improving computational efficiency.