United States

Feature selection is an important problem in machine learning, which aims to select variables that lead to an optimal predictive model. In this paper, we focus on feature selection for post-intervention outcome prediction from pre-intervention variables. We are motivated by healthcare settings, where the goal is often to select the treatment that will maximize a specific patient&#39;s outcome; however, we do not have sufficient randomized control trial data to identify well the conditional treatment effect. We show how we can use observational data to improve feature selection and effect estimation in two cases: (a) when we know the causal graph, and (b) when we do not know the causal graph but have limited experimental data. Our paper extends the notion of Markov boundary to treatment-outcome pairs. We provide theoretical guarantees for the methods we introduce. In simulated data, we show that combining observational and experimental data improves feature selection and effect estimation.

UAI 2021

Causal Markov Boundaries

post-intervention outcome prediction

causal and interventional markov boundaries

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
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Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life. 
 
Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Feature selection is an important problem in machine learning, which aims to select variables that lead to an optimal predictive model. In this paper, we focus on feature selection for post-intervention outcome prediction from pre-intervention variables. We are motivated by healthcare settings, where the goal is often to select the treatment that will maximize a specific patient's outcome; however, we do not have sufficient randomized control trial data to identify well the conditional treatment effect. We show how we can use observational data to improve feature selection and effect estimation in two cases: (a) when we know the causal graph, and (b) when we do not know the causal graph but have limited experimental data. Our paper extends the notion of Markov boundary to treatment-outcome pairs. We provide theoretical guarantees for the methods we introduce. In simulated data, we show that combining observational and experimental data improves feature selection and effect estimation.

technical paper

The Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) is one of the premier international conferences on research related to knowledge representation, learning, and reasoning in the presence of uncertainty. It is supported by the [Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (AUAI).](https://www.auai.org/)

The 37th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2021) is held fully online. We have an exciting program consisting of keynote talks by [Susan Murphy](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=A), [Eric Horvitz](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=B), [Lenka Zdeborová](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=C), [Judea Pearl](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=D) and [Ankur Moitra](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=E), a town hall meeting, peer-reviewed papers, and three workshops. The main conference is single-track and each paper is show-cased with a live component (either a live discussion and Q&A, or a live lightning talk). All papers are also featured in video presentations and in poster sessions in gather.town. The three parallel workshops on Friday allow for smaller meetings on current topics.

The walkthrough video below shows how you can navigate this site and use the different possibilities for interaction: UAIsland2021 on gather.town for posters and social interactions, the mementor platform for virtual mentoring sessions, and the chat and Q&A systems for discussions about talks and posters.

Have a great UAI 2021! 
 
 Cassio de Campos and Marloes Maathuis
 UAI 2021 Program Chairs
 uai2021programchairs@gmail.com

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A ticket is required to access this conference. Please use the provided link to register for the event.

https://auai.org/uai2021/registration

The Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) is one of the premier international conferences on research related to knowledge representation, learning, and reasoning in the presence of uncertainty. It is supported by the [Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (AUAI).](https://www.auai.org/)

Exact inference in probabilistic graphical models is particularly challenging in the presence of relational and other deterministic constraints. For discrete domains, weighted model counting has emerged as an effective and general approach in a variety of formalisms, and lifted reasoning has pushed the envelope further in exploiting symmetry properties over indistinguishable groups of objects, thereby avoiding the need to perform inference on the exponential ground theory.

Lifted Reasoning Meets Weighted Model Integration

In the last years, neural networks achieved groundbreaking successes in a wide variety of applications. However, for safety critical tasks, such as robotics and healthcare, it is necessary to provide some specific guarantees before the deployment in a real world context. Even in these scenarios, where high cost equipment and human safety are involved, the evaluation of the models is usually performed with the standard metrics (i.e., cumulative reward or success rate).

Formal Verification of Neural Networks for Safety-Critical Tasks in Deep Reinforcement Learning

Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) reinforcement learning is a powerful learning paradigm which seeks to maximize return under entropy regularization. However, action entropy does not necessarily coincide with state entropy, e.g., when multiple actions produce the same transition. Instead, we propose to maximize the transition entropy, i.e., the entropy of next states. We show that transition entropy can be described by two terms; namely, model-dependent transition entropy and action redundancy. Particularly, we explore the latter in both deterministic and stochastic settings and develop tractable approximation methods in a near model-free setup. We construct algorithms to minimize action redundancy and demonstrate their effectiveness on a synthetic environment with multiple redundant actions as well as contemporary benchmarks in Atari and Mujoco. Our results suggest that action redundancy is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning.

Action Redundancy in Reinforcement Learning

Weighted model counting (WMC) has emerged as the unifying inference mechanism across many (probabilistic) domains. Encoding an inference problem as an instance of WMC typically necessitates adding extra literals and clauses. This is partly so because the predominant definition of WMC assigns weights to models based on weights on literals, and this severely restricts what probability distributions can be represented. We develop a measure-theoretic perspective on WMC and propose a way to encode conditional weights on literals analogously to conditional probabilities. This representation can be as succinct as standard WMC with weights on literals but can also expand as needed to represent probability distributions with less structure. To demonstrate the performance benefits of conditional weights over the addition of extra literals, we develop a new WMC encoding for Bayesian networks and adapt a state-of-the-art WMC algorithm ADDMC to the new format. Our experiments show that the new encoding significantly improves the performance of the algorithm on most benchmark instances.

Weighted Model Counting with Conditional Weights for Bayesian Networks

Program synthesis has emerged as a successful approach to the image parsing task. Most prior works rely on a two-step scheme involving supervised pretraining of a Seq2Seq model with synthetic programs followed by reinforcement learning (RL) for fine-tuning with real reference images. Fully unsupervised approaches promise to train the model directly on the target images without requiring curated pretraining datasets. However, they struggle with the inherent sparsity of meaningful programs in the search space. In this paper, we present the first unsupervised algorithm capable of parsing constructive solid geometry (CSG) images into context-free grammar (CFG) without pretraining via non-differentiable renderer. To tackle the \emph{non-Markovian} sparse reward problem, we combine three key ingredients---(i) a grammar-encoded tree LSTM ensuring program validity (ii) entropy regularization and (iii) sampling without replacement from the CFG syntax tree. Empirically, our algorithm recovers meaningful programs in large search spaces (up to $3.8 \times 10^{28}$). Further, even though our approach is fully unsupervised, it generalizes better than supervised methods on the synthetic 2D CSG dataset. On the 2D computer aided design (CAD) dataset, our approach significantly outperforms the supervised pretrained model and is competitive to the refined model.

Unsupervised Program Synthesis for Images By Sampling Without Replacement

We study linear contextual bandits with access to a large, confounded, offline dataset that was sampled from some fixed policy. We show that this problem is closely related to a variant of the bandit problem with side information. We construct a linear bandit algorithm that takes advantage of the projected information, and prove regret bounds. Our results demonstrate the ability to take advantage of confounded offline data. Particularly, we prove regret bounds that improve current bounds by a factor related to the visible dimensionality of the contexts in the data. Our results indicate that confounded offline data can significantly improve online learning algorithms. Finally, we demonstrate various characteristics of our approach through synthetic simulations.

Bandits with Partially Observable Confounded Data

One of the core assumptions in causal discovery is the faithfulness assumption---i.e. assuming that independencies found in the data are due to separations in the true causal graph. This assumption can, however, be violated in many ways, including xor connections, deterministic functions or cancelling paths. In this work, we propose a weaker assumption that we call 2-adjacency faithfulness. In contrast to adjacency faithfulness, which assumes that there is no conditional independence between each pair of variables that are connected in the causal graph, we only require no conditional independence between a node and a subset of its Markov blanket that can contain up to two nodes. Equivalently, we adapt orientation faithfulness to this setting.

A Weaker Faithfulness Assumption based on Triple Interactions

A key task in multi-label classification is modeling the structure between the involved classes. Modeling this structure by probabilistic and interpretable means enables application in a broad variety of tasks such as zero-shot learning or learning from incomplete data. In this paper, we present the probabilistic rule stacking learner (pRSL) which uses probabilistic propositional logic rules and belief propagation to combine the predictions of several underlying classifiers. We derive algorithms for exact and approximate inference and learning and show that pRSL reaches state-of-the-art performance on various benchmark datasets.

Interpretable Multi-label Stacking by Learning Probabilistic Rules

We design a new efficient strategy synthesis method applicable to adversarial patrolling problems on graphs with arbitrary-length edges and possibly imperfect intrusion detection. The core ingredient is an efficient algorithm for computing the value and the gradient of a function assigning to every strategy its ``protection'' achieved. This allows for designing an efficient strategy improvement algorithm by differentiable programming and optimization techniques. Our method is the first one applicable to real-world patrolling graphs of reasonable sizes. It outperforms the state-of-the-art strategy synthesis algorithm by a margin.

Efficient Strategy Synthesis for Adversarial Patrolling Games

Black-box machine learning models can be extremely accurate.

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Lifted Reasoning Meets Weighted Model Integration

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