About

The connection between causality and AI/ML has become increasingly important in recent years, as more and more organizations seek to use AI/ML to make decisions in a variety of domains that like healthcare, finance, transportation, and more. While recent data-driven AI techniques, especially deep representation learning, have shown great promise in areas that involve data analysis, they have also been criticized for their lack of interpretability, explainability, and transparency, which can limit the trustworthiness, accountability, and reliability of AI/ML systems. Additionally, the correlations embedded in the data, which is identified by current cutting-edge models such as GPT-4 and Llama do not necessarily imply causation, which can further lead to issues like spurious correlations or algorithmic bias when such mismatch are not properly explained and addressed. Recently, causal representations have shown great potential in understanding the generating process behind data and provide a framework for understanding how machine learning models make decisions through investigating the underlying causal relationships between variables. By incorporating causal representation learning (CRL), researchers and practitioners can better understand how different features or inputs contribute to the outcome of interest and identify potential sources of bias or confounding that could affect the decision-making and further generalizations.

Moreover, from a data-centric perspective, this workshop will focus on both automatic knowledge construction utilizing causal representations discovered from pure data and knowledge enhancement based on domain expert knowledge in real-world applications. Leveraging these causal insights, practitioners can strengthen the robustness and reliability of AI/ML systems deployed in real problems, ensuring that decisions made by the intelligent system are not only data-driven but also grounded to a deeper understanding of the causal mechanism behind.

In this workshop, we discuss both theoretical and applied aspects of CRL, which includes but not limited to the following topics:

Tentative Invited Speakers and Panelists

Mihaela van der Schaar

Mihaela van der Schaar
University of Cambridge

Yan Liu

Yan Liu
University of Southern California

Ricardo Silva

Ricardo Silva
University College London

Qingyuan Zhao

Qingyuan Zhao
University of Cambridge

Biwei Huang

Biwei Huang
University of California, San Diego, USA

Jean-Francois Ton

Jean-Francois Ton
ByteDance Research, UK

Cheng Zhang

Cheng Zhang
Microsoft Research, UK

Ruocheng Guo

Ruocheng Guo
ByteDance Research, UK

Tentative Schedule

13:30-13:35 PM: Welcome remarks

Session 1: Theoretical Aspects of CRL

Session 2: Applied Aspects of CRL

Session 3: Panel Discussion

Important Dates (Anywhere on Earth)

Submissions

Please submit your manuscripts on Open Reivew. Our workshop is nonarchival, the accepted papers will be posted on our website.

Organizers:

Mingming Gong

Mingming Gong
The University of Melbourne / MBZUAI

Guangyi Chen

Guangyi Chen
Carnegie Mellon University / MBZUAI

Haoxuan Li

Haoxuan Li
Peking University

Mengyue Yang

Mengyue Yang
University College London

Defu Cao

Defu Cao
University of Southern California

Xiangchen Song

Xiangchen Song
Carnegie Mellon University

Bo Han

Bo Han
Hong Kong Baptist University / RIKEN

Tongliang Liu

Tongliang Liu
University of Sydney / MBZUAI / RIKEN