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BGM-IV: an AI-powered Bayesian generative modeling approach for instrumental variable analysis

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Instrumental-variable (IV) regression enables causal estimation under endogeneity, but modern IV problems often involve nonlinear structural effects and high-dimensional covariates. Existing nonlinear IV methods directly learn the causal relation in observed feature space or rely on learned representations within two-stage or moment-based procedures, which can struggle when the causal information is embedded in a high-dimensional representation. We propose BGM-IV, a latent Bayesian generative modeling approach that reframes nonlinear IV regression as posterior inference in a causally structured latent space. BGM-IV infers latent components that separately capture shared confounding structure, outcome-specific variation, treatment-specific variation, and covariate-only nuisance information. To account for endogeneity, BGM-IV replaces the confounded outcome likelihood with an IV-integrated pseudo-likelihood that averages over instrument-induced treatment values within the latent model. Across various benchmark datasets, BGM-IV remains competitive in the classical low-dimensional regime and performs best in high-dimensional covariate regimes. Together, these results show that structured latent generative modeling provides a principled and effective strategy to nonlinear IV estimation with rich covariates. The code of BGM-IV is available at https://github.com/liuq-lab/BGM-IV.


Explanations that reveal all through the definition of encoding

Neural Information Processing Systems

Feature attributions attempt to highlight what inputs drive predictive power. Good attributions or explanations are thus those that produce inputs that retain this predictive power; accordingly, evaluations of explanations score their quality of prediction. However, evaluations produce scores better than what appears possible from the values in the explanation for a class of explanations, called encoding explanations. Probing for encoding remains a challenge because there is no general characterization of what gives the extra predictive power. We develop a definition of encoding that identifies this extra predictive power via conditional dependence and show that the definition fits existing examples of encoding. This definition implies, in contrast to encoding explanations, that non-encoding explanations contain all the informative inputs used to produce the explanation, giving them a "what you see is what you get" property, which makes them transparent and simple to use.


Arbitrarily Scalable Environment Generators via Neural Cellular Automata

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study the problem of generating arbitrarily large environments to improve the throughput of multi-robot systems. Prior work proposes Quality Diversity (QD) algorithms as an effective method for optimizing the environments of automated warehouses. However, these approaches optimize only relatively small environments, falling short when it comes to replicating real-world warehouse sizes. The challenge arises from the exponential increase in the search space as the environment size increases.








Appendix

Neural Information Processing Systems

Overconfidence in deep neural networks could easily lead to deployments where predictions are made that should have been withheld. Figure 7: ResNet-50 trained onCIFAR-10 using focal lossγ = 0,3,4,5. Similarly, the confidence of the top predicted classˆy (for the training sample) isdenoted byˆptrain,top and theaverage equivalent inabinbyCtrain,top. Forthe training set, we care only about the confidence ofthe "true class"ˆptrain,true asthat isthe quantity which gets manipulated by some loss function. For validation set, on the other hand, we care about the confidence of the "top predicted class".