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Structural Equation/Causal Models (SEMs/SCMs) are widely used in epidemiology and social sciences to identify and analyze the average causal effect (ACE) and conditional ACE (CACE). Traditional causal effect estimation methods such as Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) and more recently Regression-With-Residuals (RWR) are widely used - as they avoid the challenging task of identifying the SCM parameters - to estimate ACE and CACE. However, much work remains before traditional estimation methods can be used for counterfactual inference, and for the benefit of Personalized Public Policy Analysis (P3A) in the social sciences. While doctors rely on personalized medicine to tailor treatments to patients in laboratory settings (relatively closed systems), P3A draws inspiration from such tailoring but adapts it for open social systems. In this article, we develop a method for counterfactual inference that we name causal-Graphical Normalizing Flow (c-GNF), facilitating P3A. A major advantage of c-GNF is that it suits the open system in which P3A is conducted. First, we show how c-GNF captures the underlying SCM without making any assumption about functional forms. This capturing capability is enabled by the deep neural networks that model the underlying SCM via observational data likelihood maximization using gradient descent. Second, we propose a novel dequantization trick to deal with discrete variables, which is a limitation of normalizing flows in general. Third, we demonstrate in experiments that c-GNF performs on-par with IPW and RWR in terms of bias and variance for estimating the ATE, when the true functional forms are known, and better when they are unknown. Fourth and most importantly, we conduct counterfactual inference with c-GNFs, demonstrating promising empirical performance. Because IPW and RWR, like other traditional methods, lack the capability of counterfactual inference, c-GNFs will likely play a major role in tailoring personalized treatment, facilitating P3A, optimizing social interventions - in contrast to the current `one-size-fits-all&#39; approach of existing methods.

AAAI 2022

Personalized Public Policy Analysis In Social Sciences Using Causal-Graphical Normalizing Flows

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community."<br>

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*





<br>

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

Structural Equation/Causal Models (SEMs/SCMs) are widely used in epidemiology and social sciences to identify and analyze the average causal effect (ACE) and conditional ACE (CACE). Traditional causal effect estimation methods such as Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) and more recently Regression-With-Residuals (RWR) are widely used - as they avoid the challenging task of identifying the SCM parameters - to estimate ACE and CACE. However, much work remains before traditional estimation methods can be used for counterfactual inference, and for the benefit of Personalized Public Policy Analysis (P3A) in the social sciences. While doctors rely on personalized medicine to tailor treatments to patients in laboratory settings (relatively closed systems), P3A draws inspiration from such tailoring but adapts it for open social systems. In this article, we develop a method for counterfactual inference that we name causal-Graphical Normalizing Flow (c-GNF), facilitating P3A. A major advantage of c-GNF is that it suits the open system in which P3A is conducted. First, we show how c-GNF captures the underlying SCM without making any assumption about functional forms. This capturing capability is enabled by the deep neural networks that model the underlying SCM via observational data likelihood maximization using gradient descent. Second, we propose a novel dequantization trick to deal with discrete variables, which is a limitation of normalizing flows in general. Third, we demonstrate in experiments that c-GNF performs on-par with IPW and RWR in terms of bias and variance for estimating the ATE, when the true functional forms are known, and better when they are unknown. Fourth and most importantly, we conduct counterfactual inference with c-GNFs, demonstrating promising empirical performance. Because IPW and RWR, like other traditional methods, lack the capability of counterfactual inference, c-GNFs will likely play a major role in tailoring personalized treatment, facilitating P3A, optimizing social interventions - in contrast to the current `one-size-fits-all' approach of existing methods.

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. 

Early detection of lung cancer is crucial for five-year survival of patients. Compared with the pathological analysis and CT scans, the circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) methylation based approach is noninvasive and cost-effective, and thus is one of the most promising methods for early detection of lung cancer. Existing studies on ctDNA methylation data measure the methylation level of each region with a predefined metric, ignoring the positions of methylated CpG sites and methylation patterns, thus are not able to capture the early cancer signals. In this paper, we propose a blood-based lung cancer detection method, and present the first ever study to represent methylation regions by continuous vectors. Specifically, we propose DeepMeth to regard each region as a one-channel image and develop an auto-encoder model to learn its representation. For each ctDNA methylation sample, DeepMeth achieves its representation via concatenating the region vectors. We evaluate DeepMeth on a multicenter clinical dataset collected from 14 hospitals. The experiments show that DeepMeth achieves about 5%-8% improvements compared with the baselines in terms of Area Under the Curve (AUC). Moreover, the experiments also demonstrate that DeepMeth can be combined with traditional scalar metrics to enhance the diagnostic power of ctDNA methylation classifiers. DeepMeth has been clinically deployed and applied to 450 patients from 94 hospitals nationally since April 2020.

Noninvasive Lung Cancer Early Detection via Deep Methylation Representation Learning

Electricity forecasting has important implications for the key decisions in modern electricity systems, ranging from power generation, transmission, distribution and so on. In the literature, traditional statistic approaches, machine-learning methods and deep learning (e.g., recurrent neural network) based models are utilized to model the trends and patterns in electricity time-series data. However, they are restricted either by their deterministic forms or by independence in probabilistic assumptions -- thereby neglecting the uncertainty or significant correlations between distributions of electricity data. Ignoring these, in turn, may yield error accumulation, especially when relying on historical data and aiming at multi-step prediction. To overcome these, we propose a novel method named Probabilistic Electricity Forecasting (PrEF) by proposing a non-linear neural state space model (SSM) and incorporating copula-augmented mechanism into that, which can learn uncertainty-dependencies knowledge and understand interactive relationships between various factors from large-scale electricity time-series data. Our method distinguishes itself from existing models by its traceable inference procedure and its capability of providing high-quality probabilistic distribution predictions. Extensive experiments on two real-world electricity datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms the alternatives.

PrEF: Probabilistic Electricity Forecasting via Copula-Augmented State Space Model

According to the official adult literacy report conducted in 24 highly-developed countries, more than 50% adults, on average, can only understand basic vocabulary, short sentences, and basic syntactic constructions. Everyday information found in news articles is thus inaccessible to many people, impeding their social inclusion and informed decision-making. Systems for automatic sentence simplification aim to provide scalable solution to this problem. In this paper, we propose new state-of-the-art sentence simplification systems for English and Spanish, and specifications for expert evaluation that are in accordance with well-established easy-to-read guidelines. We conduct expert evaluation of our new systems and the previous state-of-the-art systems for English and Spanish, and discuss strengths and weaknesses of each of them. Finally, we draw conclusions about the capabilities of the state-of-the-art sentence simplification systems and give some directions for future research.

Sentence Simplification Capabilities of Transfer-Based Models

Masked Language Models (MLMs) have shown superior performances in numerous downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks.
 Unfortunately, MLMs also demonstrate significantly worrying levels of social biases.
 We show that the previously proposed evaluation metrics for quantifying the social biases in MLMs are problematic due to the following reasons:
 (1) prediction accuracy of the masked tokens itself tend to be low in some MLMs,
 which leads to unreliable evaluation metrics, and 
 (2) in most downstream NLP tasks, masks are not used; therefore prediction of the mask is not directly related to them, and 
 (3) high-frequency words in the training data are masked more often, introducing noise due to this selection bias in the test cases.
 Therefore, we propose All Unmasked Likelihood (AUL), a bias evaluation measure that predicts all tokens in a test case given the MLM embedding of the unmasked input and AUL with Attention weights (AULA) to evaluate tokens based on their importance in a sentence.
 Our experimental results show that the proposed bias evaluation measures accurately detect different types of biases in MLMs, and unlike AUL and AULA, previously proposed measures for MLMs systematically overestimate the measured biases and are heavily influenced by the unmasked tokens in the context.

Unmasking the Mask – Evaluating Social Biases in Masked Language Models

Particle physics simulations are the cornerstone of nuclear engineering applications. Among them radiotherapy (RT) is crucial for society, with 50% of cancer patients receiving radiation treatments. For the most precise targeting of tumors, next generation RT treatments aim for real-time correction during radiation delivery, necessitating particle transport algorithms that yield precise dose distributions in sub-second times even in highly heterogeneous patient geometries. This is infeasible with currently available, purely physics based simulations. In this study, we present a data-driven dose calculation algorithm predicting the dose deposited by mono-energetic proton beams for arbitrary energies and patient geometries. Our approach frames particle transport as sequence modeling, where convolutional layers extract important spatial features into tokens and the transformer self-attention mechanism routes information between such tokens in the sequence and a beam energy token. We train our network and evaluate prediction accuracy using computationally expensive but accurate Monte Carlo (MC) simulations, considered the gold standard in particle physics. Our proposed model is 33 times faster than current clinical analytic pencil beam algorithms, improving upon their accuracy in the most heterogeneous and challenging geometries. With a relative error of 0.34Â±0.2% and very high gamma pass rate of 99.59Â±0.7% (1%, 3 mm), it also greatly outperforms the only published similar data-driven proton dose algorithm, even at a finer grid resolution. Offering MC precision 4000 times faster, our model could overcome a major obstacle that has so far prohibited real-time adaptive proton treatments and significantly increase cancer treatment efficacy. Its potential to model physics interactions of other particles could also boost heavy ion treatment planning procedures limited by the speed of traditional methods.

Learning the Physics of Particle Transport via Transformers

Accurate electricity demand forecasts play a key role in sustainable power systems. To enable better decision-making especially for demand flexibility of the end-user, it is necessary to provide not only accurate but also understandable and actionable forecasts. To provide accurate forecasts Global Forecasting Models (GFM) that are trained across time series have shown superior results in many demand forecasting competitions and real-world applications recently, compared with univariate forecasting approaches. We aim to fill the gap between the accuracy and the interpretability in global forecasting approaches. 
 In order to explain the global model forecasts, we propose Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Rule-based Explanations for Forecasting (LIMREF), which is a local explainer framework that produces k-optimal impact rules for a particular forecast, considering the global forecasting model as a black-box model, in a model-agnostic way. It provides different types of rules which explain the forecast of the global model and the counterfactual rules, which provide actionable insights for potential changes to obtain different outputs for given instances. We conduct experiments using a large-scale electricity demand dataset with exogenous features such as temperature and calendar effects. Here, we evaluate the quality of the explanations produced by the LIMREF framework in terms of both qualitative and quantitative aspects such as accuracy, fidelity and comprehensibility, and benchmark those against other local explainers.

LIMREF: Local Interpretable Model Agnostic Rule-Based Explanations for Forecasting, with an Application to Electricity Smart Meter Data

Agriculture is the foundation of human civilization. However, the rapid increase of the global population poses a challenge on this cornerstone by demanding more food. Modern autonomous greenhouses, equipped with sensors and actuators, provide a promising solution to the problem by empowering precise control for high-efficient food production. However, the optimal control of autonomous greenhouses is challenging, requiring decision-making based on high-dimensional sensory data, and the scaling of production is limited by the scarcity of labor capable of handling this task. With the advances of artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT), and cloud computing technologies, we are hopeful to provide a solution to automate and smarten greenhouse control to address the above challenges. In this paper, we propose a smart agriculture solution named iGrow, for autonomous greenhouse control (AGC): (1) for the first time, we formulate the AGC problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) optimization problem; (2) we design a neural network-based simulator incorporated with the incremental mechanism to simulate the complete planting process of an autonomous greenhouse, which provides a testbed for the optimization of control strategies; (3) we propose a closed-loop bi-level optimization algorithm, which can dynamically re-optimize the greenhouse control strategy with newly observed data during real-world production. We not only conduct simulation experiments but also deploy iGrow in real scenarios, and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of iGrow in autonomous greenhouse simulation and optimal control. Particularly, compelling results from the tomato pilot project in real autonomous greenhouses show that our solution significantly increases crop yield (+10.15%) and net profit (+92.70%) with statistical significance compared to planting experts. Our solution opens up a new avenue for greenhouse production. The code is available at https://github.com/holmescao/iGrow.git.

iGrow: A Smart Agriculture Solution to Autonomous Greenhouse Control

Being able to explain the prediction to clinical end-users is a necessity to leverage the power of artificial intelligence (AI) models for clinical decision support. For medical images, a feature attribution map, or heatmap, is the most common form of explanation that highlights important features for AI models' prediction. However, it is unknown how well heatmaps perform on explaining decisions on multi-modal medical images, where each image modality or channel visualizes distinct clinical information of the same underlying biomedical phenomenon. Understanding such modality-dependent features is essential for clinical users' interpretation of AI decisions. To tackle this clinically important but technically ignored problem, we propose the modality-specific feature importance (MSFI) metric. It encodes clinical image and explanation interpretation patterns of modality prioritization and modality-specific feature localization. We conduct a clinical requirement-grounded, systematic evaluation using computational methods and a clinician user study. Results show that the examined 16 heatmap algorithms failed to fulfill clinical requirements to correctly indicate AI model decision process or decision quality. The evaluation and MSFI metric can guide the design and selection of explainable AI algorithms to meet clinical requirements on multi-modal explanation.

Evaluating Explainable AI on a Multi-Modal Medical Imaging Task: Can Existing Algorithms Fulfill Clinical Requirements?

Gender bias is one of the most common and well-studied demographic biases in information retrieval, and in general in AI systems. After discovering and reporting that gender bias for certain professions could change searchers' worldviews, mainstreaming image search engines, such as Google, quickly took action to correct and fix such a bias. However, given the nature of these systems, viz., being opaque, it is unclear if they addressed unequal gender representation and gender stereotypes in image search results systematically and in a sustainable way. In this paper, we propose adversarial attack queries composed of professions and countries (e.g., 'CEO United States') to investigate whether gender bias is thoroughly mitigated by image search engines. Our experiments on Google, Baidu, Naver, and Yandex Image Search show that the proposed attack can trigger high levels of gender bias in image search results very effectively. To defend against such attacks and mitigate gender bias, we design and implement three novel re-ranking algorithms -- epsilon-greedy algorithm, relevance-aware swapping algorithm, and fairness-greedy algorithm, to re-rank returned images for given image queries. Experiments on both simulated (three typical gender distributions) and real-world datasets demonstrate the proposed algorithms can mitigate gender bias effectively.

Has CEO Gender Bias Really Been Fixed? Adversarial Attacking and Improving Gender Fairness in Image Search

Over the past several years, legal applications of deep learning have been on the rise. However, as with other high-stakes decision making areas, the requirement for interpretability is of crucial importance. Current models utilized by legal practitioners are more of the conventional machine learning type, wherein they are inherently interpretable, yet unable to harness the performance capabilities of data-driven deep learning models. In this work, we utilize deep learning models in the area of trademark law to shed light on the issue of likelihood of confusion between trademarks. Specifically, we introduce a model-agnostic interpretable intermediate layer, a technique which proves to be effective for legal documents. Furthermore, we utilize weakly supervised learning by means of a curriculum learning strategy, effectively demonstrating the improved performance of a deep learning model. This is in contrast to the conventional models which are only able to utilize the limited number of expensive manually-annotated samples by legal experts. Although the methods presented in this work tackles the task of risk of confusion for trademarks, it is straightforward to extend them to other fields of law, or more generally, to other similar high-stakes application scenarios.

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Noninvasive Lung Cancer Early Detection via Deep Methylation Representation Learning

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Noninvasive Lung Cancer Early Detection via Deep Methylation Representation Learning

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Language Models as Causal Effect Generators

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