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Elke Kirschbaum

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4 papers

2 author rows

CLeaR Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Estimating Joint Interventional Distributions from Marginal Interventional Data

Sergio Hernan Garrido Mejia
Elke Kirschbaum
Armin Keki\'c
Bernhard Sch\"olkopf
Atalanti A. Mastakouri

In this paper we show how to exploit interventional data to acquire the joint conditional distribution of all the variables using the Maximum Entropy principle. To this end, we extend the Causal Maximum Entropy method to make use of data arising from identifiable interventional distributions in addition to data from the observational distribution. Using Lagrange duality, we prove that the solution to the Causal Maximum Entropy problem with interventional constraints lies in the exponential family, as in the Maximum Entropy solution. Our method allows us to perform two tasks of interest when marginal interventional distributions are provided for any subset of the variables. First, we show how to perform parental discovery from a mixture of observational and single-variable interventional data, and, second, how to infer joint interventional distributions. For the former task, we show on synthetically generated data, that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art method on merging datasets, and yields comparable results to the KCI-test which requires access to joint observations of all variables.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

QA-Calibration of Language Model Confidence Scores

Putra Manggala
Atalanti-Anastasia Mastakouri
Elke Kirschbaum
Shiva Prasad Kasiviswanathan
Aaditya Ramdas

To use generative question-and-answering (QA) systems for decision-making and in any critical application, these systems need to provide well-calibrated confidence scores that reflect the correctness of their answers. Existing calibration methods aim to ensure that the confidence score is, *on average*, indicative of the likelihood that the answer is correct. We argue, however, that this standard (average-case) notion of calibration is difficult to interpret for decision-making in generative QA. To address this, we generalize the standard notion of average calibration and introduce QA-calibration, which ensures calibration holds across different question-and-answer groups. We then propose discretized posthoc calibration schemes for achieving QA-calibration. We establish distribution-free guarantees on the performance of this method and validate our method on confidence scores returned by elicitation prompts across multiple QA benchmarks and large language models (LLMs).

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ICML Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Causal Inference Through the Structural Causal Marginal Problem

Luigi Gresele
Julius von Kügelgen
Jonas M. Kübler
Elke Kirschbaum
Bernhard Schölkopf
Dominik Janzing

We introduce an approach to counterfactual inference based on merging information from multiple datasets. We consider a causal reformulation of the statistical marginal problem: given a collection of marginal structural causal models (SCMs) over distinct but overlapping sets of variables, determine the set of joint SCMs that are counterfactually consistent with the marginal ones. We formalise this approach for categorical SCMs using the response function formulation and show that it reduces the space of allowed marginal and joint SCMs. Our work thus highlights a new mode of falsifiability through additional variables, in contrast to the statistical one via additional data.

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NeurIPS Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Sparse convolutional coding for neuronal assembly detection

Sven Peter
Elke Kirschbaum
Martin Both
Lee Campbell
Brandon Harvey
Conor Heins
Daniel Durstewitz
Ferran Diego

Cell assemblies, originally proposed by Donald Hebb (1949), are subsets of neurons firing in a temporally coordinated way that gives rise to repeated motifs supposed to underly neural representations and information processing. Although Hebb's original proposal dates back many decades, the detection of assemblies and their role in coding is still an open and current research topic, partly because simultaneous recordings from large populations of neurons became feasible only relatively recently. Most current and easy-to-apply computational techniques focus on the identification of strictly synchronously spiking neurons. In this paper we propose a new algorithm, based on sparse convolutional coding, for detecting recurrent motifs of arbitrary structure up to a given length. Testing of our algorithm on synthetically generated datasets shows that it outperforms established methods and accurately identifies the temporal structure of embedded assemblies, even when these contain overlapping neurons or when strong background noise is present. Moreover, exploratory analysis of experimental datasets from hippocampal slices and cortical neuron cultures have provided promising results.

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