Black Box Causal Inference: Effect Estimation via Meta Prediction

Causal inference and the estimation of causal effects plays a central role in decision-making across many areas, including healthcare and economics. Estimating causal effects typically requires an estimator that is tailored to each problem of interest. But developing estimators can take significant effort for even a single causal inference setting. For example, algorithms for regression-based estimators, propensity score methods, and doubly robust methods were designed across several decades to handle causal estimation with observed confounders. Similarly, several estimators have been developed to exploit instrumental variables (IVs), including two-stage least-squares (TSLS), control functions, and the method-of-moments. In this work, we instead frame causal inference as a dataset-level prediction problem, offloading algorithm design to the learning process. The approach we introduce, called black box causal inference (BBCI), builds estimators in a black-box manner by learning to predict causal effects from sampled dataset-effect pairs. We demonstrate accurate estimation of average treatment effects (ATEs) and conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) with BBCI across several causal inference problems with known identification, including problems with less developed estimators.

An Overview of Large Language Models for Statisticians

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as transformative tools in artificial intelligence (AI), exhibiting remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks such as text generation, reasoning, and decision-making. While their success has primarily been driven by advances in computational power and deep learning architectures, emerging problems -- in areas such as uncertainty quantification, decision-making, causal inference, and distribution shift -- require a deeper engagement with the field of statistics. This paper explores potential areas where statisticians can make important contributions to the development of LLMs, particularly those that aim to engender trustworthiness and transparency for human users. Thus, we focus on issues such as uncertainty quantification, interpretability, fairness, privacy, watermarking and model adaptation. We also consider possible roles for LLMs in statistical analysis. By bridging AI and statistics, we aim to foster a deeper collaboration that advances both the theoretical foundations and practical applications of LLMs, ultimately shaping their role in addressing complex societal challenges.

Meta-Statistical Learning: Supervised Learning of Statistical Inference

This work demonstrates that the tools and principles driving the success of large language models (LLMs) can be repurposed to tackle distribution-level tasks, where the goal is to predict properties of the data-generating distribution rather than labels for individual datapoints. These tasks encompass statistical inference problems such as parameter estimation, hypothesis testing, or mutual information estimation. Framing these tasks within traditional machine learning pipelines is challenging, as supervision is typically tied to individual datapoint. We propose meta-statistical learning, a framework inspired by multi-instance learning that reformulates statistical inference tasks as supervised learning problems. In this approach, entire datasets are treated as single inputs to neural networks, which predict distribution-level parameters. Transformer-based architectures, without positional encoding, provide a natural fit due to their permutation-invariance properties. By training on large-scale synthetic datasets, meta-statistical models can leverage the scalability and optimization infrastructure of Transformer-based LLMs. We demonstrate the framework's versatility with applications in hypothesis testing and mutual information estimation, showing strong performance, particularly for small datasets where traditional neural methods struggle.

NaturalReasoning: Reasoning in the Wild with 2.8M Challenging Questions

Scaling reasoning capabilities beyond traditional domains such as math and coding is hindered by the lack of diverse and high-quality questions. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a scalable approach for generating diverse and challenging reasoning questions, accompanied by reference answers. We present NaturalReasoning, a comprehensive dataset comprising 2.8 million questions that span multiple domains, including STEM fields (e.g., Physics, Computer Science), Economics, Social Sciences, and more. We demonstrate the utility of the questions in NaturalReasoning through knowledge distillation experiments which show that NaturalReasoning can effectively elicit and transfer reasoning capabilities from a strong teacher model. Furthermore, we demonstrate that NaturalReasoning is also effective for unsupervised self-training using external reward models or self-rewarding.

The Geometry of Prompting: Unveiling Distinct Mechanisms of Task Adaptation in Language Models

Decoder-only language models have the ability to dynamically switch between various computational tasks based on input prompts. Despite many successful applications of prompting, there is very limited understanding of the internal mechanism behind such flexibility. In this work, we investigate how different prompting methods affect the geometry of representations in these models. Employing a framework grounded in statistical physics, we reveal that various prompting techniques, while achieving similar performance, operate through distinct representational mechanisms for task adaptation. Our analysis highlights the critical role of input distribution samples and label semantics in few-shot in-context learning. We also demonstrate evidence of synergistic and interfering interactions between different tasks on the representational level. Our work contributes to the theoretical understanding of large language models and lays the groundwork for developing more effective, representation-aware prompting strategies.

Supervised Contrastive Block Disentanglement

Real-world datasets often combine data collected under different experimental conditions. This yields larger datasets, but also introduces spurious correlations that make it difficult to model the phenomena of interest. We address this by learning two embeddings to independently represent the phenomena of interest and the spurious correlations. The embedding representing the phenomena of interest is correlated with the target variable $y$, and is invariant to the environment variable $e$. In contrast, the embedding representing the spurious correlations is correlated with $e$. The invariance to $e$ is difficult to achieve on real-world datasets. Our primary contribution is an algorithm called Supervised Contrastive Block Disentanglement (SCBD) that effectively enforces this invariance. It is based purely on Supervised Contrastive Learning, and applies to real-world data better than existing approaches. We empirically validate SCBD on two challenging problems. The first problem is domain generalization, where we achieve strong performance on a synthetic dataset, as well as on Camelyon17-WILDS. We introduce a single hyperparameter $\alpha$ to control the degree of invariance to $e$. When we increase $\alpha$ to strengthen the degree of invariance, out-of-distribution performance improves at the expense of in-distribution performance. The second problem is batch correction, in which we apply SCBD to preserve biological signal and remove inter-well batch effects when modeling single-cell perturbations from 26 million Optical Pooled Screening images.

Cost-Efficient Continual Learning with Sufficient Exemplar Memory

Continual learning (CL) research typically assumes highly constrained exemplar memory resources. However, in many real-world scenarios-especially in the era of large foundation models-memory is abundant, while GPU computational costs are the primary bottleneck. In this work, we investigate CL in a novel setting where exemplar memory is ample (i.e., sufficient exemplar memory). Unlike prior methods designed for strict exemplar memory constraints, we propose a simple yet effective approach that directly operates in the model's weight space through a combination of weight resetting and averaging techniques. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance while reducing the computational cost to a quarter or third of existing methods. These findings challenge conventional CL assumptions and provide a practical baseline for computationally efficient CL applications.

HERITAGE: An End-to-End Web Platform for Processing Korean Historical Documents in Hanja

While Korean historical documents are invaluable cultural heritage, understanding those documents requires in-depth Hanja expertise. Hanja is an ancient language used in Korea before the 20th century, whose characters were borrowed from old Chinese but had evolved in Korea for centuries. Modern Koreans and Chinese cannot understand Korean historical documents without substantial additional help, and while previous efforts have produced some Korean and English translations, this requires in-depth expertise, and so most of the documents are not translated into any modern language. To address this gap, we present HERITAGE, the first open-source Hanja NLP toolkit to assist in understanding and translating the unexplored Korean historical documents written in Hanja. HERITAGE is a web-based platform providing model predictions of three critical tasks in historical document understanding via Hanja language models: punctuation restoration, named entity recognition, and machine translation (MT). HERITAGE also provides an interactive glossary, which provides the character-level reading of the Hanja characters in modern Korean, as well as character-level English definition. HERITAGE serves two purposes. First, anyone interested in these documents can get a general understanding from the model predictions and the interactive glossary, especially MT outputs in Korean and English. Second, since the model outputs are not perfect, Hanja experts can revise them to produce better annotations and translations. This would boost the translation efficiency and potentially lead to most of the historical documents being translated into modern languages, lowering the barrier on unexplored Korean historical documents.

How To Think About End-To-End Encryption and AI: Training, Processing, Disclosure, and Consent

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) has become the gold standard for securing communications, bringing strong confidentiality and privacy guarantees to billions of users worldwide. However, the current push towards widespread integration of artificial intelligence (AI) models, including in E2EE systems, raises some serious security concerns. This work performs a critical examination of the (in)compatibility of AI models and E2EE applications. We explore this on two fronts: (1) the integration of AI "assistants" within E2EE applications, and (2) the use of E2EE data for training AI models. We analyze the potential security implications of each, and identify conflicts with the security guarantees of E2EE. Then, we analyze legal implications of integrating AI models in E2EE applications, given how AI integration can undermine the confidentiality that E2EE promises. Finally, we offer a list of detailed recommendations based on our technical and legal analyses, including: technical design choices that must be prioritized to uphold E2EE security; how service providers must accurately represent E2EE security; and best practices for the default behavior of AI features and for requesting user consent. We hope this paper catalyzes an informed conversation on the tensions that arise between the brisk deployment of AI and the security offered by E2EE, and guides the responsible development of new AI features.

HIST-AID: Leveraging Historical Patient Reports for Enhanced Multi-Modal Automatic Diagnosis

Chest X-ray imaging is a widely accessible and non-invasive diagnostic tool for detecting thoracic abnormalities. While numerous AI models assist radiologists in interpreting these images, most overlook patients' historical data. To bridge this gap, we introduce Temporal MIMIC dataset, which integrates five years of patient history, including radiographic scans and reports from MIMIC-CXR and MIMIC-IV, encompassing 12,221 patients and thirteen pathologies. Building on this, we present HIST-AID, a framework that enhances automatic diagnostic accuracy using historical reports. HIST-AID emulates the radiologist's comprehensive approach, leveraging historical data to improve diagnostic accuracy. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements, with AUROC increasing by 6.56% and AUPRC by 9.51% compared to models that rely solely on radiographic scans. These gains were consistently observed across diverse demographic groups, including variations in gender, age, and racial categories. We show that while recent data boost performance, older data may reduce accuracy due to changes in patient conditions. Our work paves the potential of incorporating historical data for more reliable automatic diagnosis, providing critical support for clinical decision-making.