United States

The aim of this paper is to offer the first systematic exploration and definition of equivalent causal models in the context where both models are not made up of the same variables. The idea is that two models are equivalent when they agree on all &quot;essential&quot; causal information that can be expressed using their common variables. I do so by focussing on the two main features of causal models, namely their structural relations and their functional relations. In particular, I define several relations of causal ancestry and several relations of causal sufficiency, and require that the most general of these relations are preserved across equivalent models.

AAAI 2021

Equivalent Causal Models

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
[Read more](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GI_hvOpjswAuYdUTromfeDiPpCcqidwg/view?usp=sharing)

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline - subject line "Welcome to ACL 2025". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

Please log in

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. 

ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

The aim of this paper is to offer the first systematic exploration and definition of equivalent causal models in the context where both models are not made up of the same variables. The idea is that two models are equivalent when they agree on all "essential" causal information that can be expressed using their common variables. I do so by focussing on the two main features of causal models, namely their structural relations and their functional relations. In particular, I define several relations of causal ancestry and several relations of causal sufficiency, and require that the most general of these relations are preserved across equivalent models.

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Although the recent image-based 3D object detection methods using Pseudo-LiDAR representation have shown great capabilities, a notable gap in efficiency and accuracy still exist compared with LiDAR-based methods. Besides, over-reliance on the stand-alone depth estimator, requiring a large number of pixel-wise annotations in the training stage and more computation in the inferencing stage, limits the scaling application in the real world.
In this paper, we propose an efficient and accurate 3D object detection method from stereo images, named RTS3D. Different from the 3D occupancy space in the Pseudo-LiDAR similar methods, we design a novel 4D feature-consistent embedding (FCE) space as the intermediate representation of the 3D scene without depth supervision. The FCE space encodes the object's structural and semantic information by exploring the multi-scale feature consistency warped from stereo pair. Furthermore, a semantic-guided RBF (Radial Basis Function) and a structure-aware attention module are devised to reduce the influence of FCE space noise without instance mask supervision. Experiments on KITTI benchmark show that RTS3D is the first true real-time system (FPS>24) for stereo image 3D detection meanwhile achieves 10% improvement in average precision comparing with the previous state-of-the-art method.

RTS3D: Real-Time Stereo 3D Detection From 4D Feature-Consistency Embedding Space for Autonomous Driving

Beckers & Vennekens recently proposed a definition of actual causation that is based on certain plausible principles, thereby allowing the debate on causation to shift away from its heavy focus on examples towards a more systematic analysis. This paper contributes to that analysis in two ways. First, I show that their definition is in fact a formalization of Wrightâ€™s famous NESS definition of causation combined with a counterfactual difference-making condition. This means that their definition integrates two highly influential approaches to causation that are claimed to stand in opposition to each other. Second, I modify their definition to offer a substantial improvement: I weaken their difference-making condition in such a way that it avoids their problematic analysis of cases of preemption. The resulting Counterfactual NESS definition of causation forms a natural compromise between counterfactual approaches and the NESS approach.

The Counterfactual NESS Definition of Causation

Building a good feature space is essential for the metric-based few-shot algorithms to recognize a novel class with only a few samples. The feature space is often built by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). However, CNNs primarily focus on local information with the limited receptive field, and the global information generated by distant pixels is not well used. Meanwhile, having a global understanding of the current task and focusing on distinct regions of the same sample for different queries are important for the few-shot classification. To tackle these problems, we propose the Cross Non-Local Neural Network (CNL) for capturing the long-range dependency of the samples and the current task. CNL extracts the task-specific and context-aware features dynamically by strengthening the features of the sample at a position via aggregating information from all positions of itself and the current task. To reduce losing important information, we maximize the mutual information between the original and refined features as a constraint. Moreover, we add a task-specific scaling to deal with multi-scale and task-specific features extracted by CNL. We conduct extensive experiments for validating our proposed algorithm, which achieves new state-of-the-art performances on two public benchmarks.

Looking Wider for Better Adaptive Representation in Few-Shot Learning

Recent years, human-object interaction (HOI) detection has achieved impressive advances. However, conventional two-stage methods are usually slow in inference. On the other hand, existing one-stage methods mainly focus on the union regions of interactions, which introduce unnecessary visual information as disturbances to HOI detection. To tackle the problems above, we propose a novel one-stage HOI detection approach DIRV in this paper, based on a new concept called interaction region for the HOI problem. Unlike previous methods, our approach concentrates on the densely sampled interaction regions across different scales for each human-object pair, so as to capture the subtle visual features that is most essential to the interaction. Moreover, in order to compensate for the detection flaws of a single interaction region, we introduce a novel voting strategy that makes full use of those overlapped interaction regions in place of conventional Non-Maximal Suppression (NMS). Extensive experiments on two popular benchmarks: V-COCO and HICO-DET show that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-arts by a large margin with the highest inference speed and lightest network architecture. Our code 
is publicly available at www.github.com/MVIG-SJTU/DIRV.

DIRV: Dense Interaction Region Voting for End-to-End Human-Object Interaction Detection

Thermal infrared detection systems play an important role in many areas such as night security, autonomous driving, and body temperature detection. They have the unique advantages of passive imaging, temperature sensitivity and penetration. But the security of these systems themselves has not been fully explored, which poses risks in applying these systems. We propose a physical attack method with small bulbs on a board against the state of-the-art pedestrian detectors. Our goal is to make infrared pedestrian detectors unable to detect real-world pedestrians. Towards this goal, we ï¬rst showed that it is possible to use two kinds of patches to attack the infrared pedestrian detector based on YOLOv3. The average precision (AP) dropped by 64.12% in the digital world, while a blank board with the same size caused the AP to drop by 29.69% only. After that, we designed and manufactured a physical board and successfully attacked YOLOv3 in the real world. In recorded videos, the physical board caused AP of the target detector to drop by 34.48%, while a blank board with the same size caused the AP to drop by 14.91% only. With the ensemble attack techniques, the designed physical board had good transferability to unseen detectors.

Fooling Thermal Infrared Pedestrian Detector in Real World Using Small Bulbs

Explaining the predictions of AI models is paramount in safety-critical applications, such as in legal or medical domains.
One form of explanation for a prediction is an extractive rationale, i.e., a subset of features of an instance that lead the model to give its prediction on the instance. Previous works on generating extractive rationales usually employ a two-phase model: a selector that selects the most important features (i.e., the rationale) followed by a predictor that makes the prediction based exclusively on the selected features. One disadvantage of these works is that the main signal for learning to select features comes from the comparison of the final answers given by the predictor and the ground-truth answers. In this work, we propose to squeeze more information from the predictor via an information calibration method. More precisely, we train two models jointly: one is a typical neural model that solves the task at hand in an accurate but black-box manner, and the other is a selector-predictor model that additionally produces a rationale for its prediction. The first model is used as a guide to the second model. We use an adversarial-based technique to calibrate the information extracted by the two models such that the difference between them is an indicator of the missed or over-selected features. In addition, for natural language tasks, we propose to use a language-model-based regularizer to encourage the extraction of fluent rationales. Experimental results on a sentiment analysis task as well as on three tasks from the legal domain show the effectiveness of our approach to rationale extraction.

Learning from the Best: Rationalizing Predictions by Adversarial information Calibration

Most weakly supervised fine-grained image recognition (WFGIR) approaches predominantly focus on learning the discriminative details which contain the visual variances and position clues. The position clues can be indirectly learnt by utilizing context information of discriminative visual content. However, this will cause the selected discriminative regions containing some non-discriminative information introduced by the position clues. These analysis motivate us to directly introduce position clues into visual content to only focus on the visual variances, achieving more precise discriminative region localization. Though important, position modelling usually requires significant pixel/region annotations and therefore is labor-intensive. To address this issue, we propose an end-to-end Dynamic Position-aware Network (DP-Net) to directly incorporate the position clues into visual content and dynamically align them without extra annotations, which eliminates the effect of position information for visual variances of subcategories. In particular, the DP-Net consists of: 1) Position Encoding Module, which learns a set of position-aware parts by directly adding the learnable position information into the horizontal/vertical visual content of images; 2) Position-vision Aligning Module, which dynamically aligns both visual content and learnable position information via performing graph convolution on position-aware parts; 3) Position-vision Reorganization Module, which projects the aligned position clues and visual content into the Euclidean space to construct a position-aware feature maps. Finally, the position-aware feature maps are used which is implicitly applied the aligned visual content and position clues for more accurate discriminative regions localization. Extensive experiments verify that DP-Net yields the best performance under the same settings with most competitive approaches, on CUB Bird, Stanford-Cars, and FGVC Aircraft datasets.

Dynamic Position-Aware Network for Fine-Grained Image Recognition

In this paper, we focus on the challenging few-shot class incremental learning (FSCIL) problem, which requires to transfer knowledge from old tasks to new ones and solves catastrophic forgetting. We propose the exemplar relation distillation incremental learning framework to balance the tasks of old-knowledge preserving and new-knowledge adaptation. First, we construct an exemplar relation graph to represent the knowledge learned by the original network and update gradually for new tasks learning. Then an exemplar relation loss function for discovering the relation knowledge between
different classes is introduced to learn and transfer the structural information in relation graph. A large number of experiments demonstrate that relation knowledge does exist in the exemplars and our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art class-incremental learning methods on the CIFAR100, miniImageNet, and CUB200 datasets.

Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning via Relation Knowledge Distillation

Controlling the style  of natural language by disentangling the latent space is an important step towards interpretable machine learning. After the latent space is disentangled, the style of a sentence can be transformed by tuning the style representation without affecting other features of the sentence. Previous works usually use adversarial training to guarantee that disentangled vectors do not affect each other.  However, adversarial methods are difficult to train. Especially when there are multiple features (e.g., sentiment, or tense, which we call style types in this paper), each feature requires a separate discriminator  for extracting a disentangled style vector corresponding to that feature. In this paper, we propose a unified distribution-controlling method, which provides each specific style value (the value of style types, e.g., positive sentiment, or past tense) with a unique representation. This method contributes a solid theoretical basis to avoid adversarial training in multi-type disentanglement. We also propose multiple loss functions to achieve a style-content disentanglement as well as a disentanglement among multiple style types. In addition, we observe that if two different style types always have some specific style values    that occur together in the dataset, they will affect each other when transferring the style values. We call this phenomenon  training bias , and we propose a loss function to alleviate such training bias while disentangling multiple types. We conduct experiments on two datasets (Yelp service reviews and Amazon product reviews) to evaluate the style-disentangling effect and the unsupervised style-transfer performance on two style types: sentiment and tense. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our model.

Multi-Type Disentanglement without Adversarial Training

This paper studies the budget-feasible mechanism design over graphs, where a buyer wishes to procure items from sellers, and all participants (the buyer and sellers) can only directly interact with their neighbors during the auction campaign. The problem for the buyer is to use the limited budget to incentivize sellers to propagate auction information to their neighbors, thereby more sellers will be informed of the auction and more item value will be procured. An impossibility result shows that the large-market assumption is necessary. We propose efficient budget-feasible diffusion mechanisms for large markets that simultaneously guarantee individual rationality, budget-feasibility, strong budget-balance, incentive-compatibility to report private costs and diffuse auction information. Moreover, the proposed mechanisms achieve logarithmic approximation that the total procured value is within a logarithmic factor of the optimal solution. Compared to most related budget-feasible mechanisms, which do not take the individual interactions among sellers into account, our mechanisms can incentivize sellers to further propagate auction information to other potential sellers. Meanwhile, existing related diffusion mechanisms only focus on seller-centric auctions and fail to satisfy the budget-feasibility of the buyer.

Downloads

Next from AAAI 2021

RTS3D: Real-Time Stereo 3D Detection From 4D Feature-Consistency Embedding Space for Autonomous Driving

Similar lecture

On the Reliability of Large Language Models for Causal Discovery

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

.css-70qvj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}Downloads

Next from AAAI 2021

RTS3D: Real-Time Stereo 3D Detection From 4D Feature-Consistency Embedding Space for Autonomous Driving

Similar lecture

On the Reliability of Large Language Models for Causal Discovery

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads