In epidemiology, understanding causal mechanisms across different populations is essential for designing effective public health interventions. Recently, difference graphs have been introduced as a tool to visually represent causal variations between two distinct populations. While there has been progress in inferring these graphs from data through causal discovery methods, there remains a gap in systematically leveraging their potential to enhance causal reasoning. This paper addresses that gap by establishing conditions for identifying causal changes and effects using difference graphs and observational data. It specifically focuses on identifying total causal changes and total effects in a nonparametric framework, as well as direct causal changes and direct effects in a linear context. In doing so, it provides a novel approach to causal reasoning that holds potential for various public health applications.

Taking into account background knowledge as the context has always been an important part of solving tasks that involve natural language. One representative example of such tasks is text-based games, where players need to make decisions based on both description text previously shown in the game, and their own background knowledge about the language and common sense. In this work, we investigate not simply giving common sense, as can be seen in prior research, but also its effective usage. We assume that a part of the environment states different from common sense should constitute one of the grounds for action selection. We propose a novel agent, DiffG-RL, which constructs a Difference Graph that organizes the environment states and common sense by means of interactive objects with a dedicated graph encoder. DiffG-RL also contains a framework for extracting the appropriate amount and representation of common sense from the source to support the construction of the graph. We validate DiffG-RL in experiments with text-based games that require common sense and show that it outperforms baselines by 17% of scores. The code is available at https://github.com/ibm/diffg-rl

Jian Ding, Yihong Wu, Jiaming Xu, and Dana Yang November 20, 2019 Abstract Motivated by applications such as discovering strong ties in social networks and assembling genome subsequences in biology, we study the problem of recovering a hidden 2 k -nearest neighbor (NN) graph in an n -vertex complete graph, whose edge weights are independent and distributed according to P n for edges in the hidden 2 k -NN graph and Q n otherwise. We focus on two types of asymptotic recovery guarantees as n: (1) exact recovery: all edges are classified correctly with probability tending to one; (2) almost exact recovery: the expected number of misclassified edges is o (nk). We show that the maximum likelihood estimator achieves (1) exact recovery for 2 k n o(1) if lim inf 2α n log n 1; (2) almost exact recovery for 1 k o null log n log log nnull if lim inf kD ( P n Q n) log n 1, where α n null 2 log null dP ndQ n is the R enyi divergence of order 1 2 and D (P n Q n) is the Kullback-Leibler divergence.