4 Papers

2.7CLDec 11, 2025
Causal Reasoning Favors Encoders: On The Limits of Decoder-Only Models

Amartya Roy, Elamparithy M, Kripabandhu Ghosh et al.

In context learning (ICL) underpins recent advances in large language models (LLMs), although its role and performance in causal reasoning remains unclear. Causal reasoning demands multihop composition and strict conjunctive control, and reliance on spurious lexical relations of the input could provide misleading results. We hypothesize that, due to their ability to project the input into a latent space, encoder and encoder decoder architectures are better suited for said multihop conjunctive reasoning versus decoder only models. To do this, we compare fine-tuned versions of all the aforementioned architectures with zero and few shot ICL in both natural language and non natural language scenarios. We find that ICL alone is insufficient for reliable causal reasoning, often overfocusing on irrelevant input features. In particular, decoder only models are noticeably brittle to distributional shifts, while finetuned encoder and encoder decoder models can generalize more robustly across our tests, including the non natural language split. Both architectures are only matched or surpassed by decoder only architectures at large scales. We conclude by noting that for cost effective, short horizon robust causal reasoning, encoder or encoder decoder architectures with targeted finetuning are preferable.

1.0CLSep 24, 2024
Do the Right Thing, Just Debias! Multi-Category Bias Mitigation Using LLMs

Amartya Roy, Danush Khanna, Devanshu Mahapatra et al.

This paper tackles the challenge of building robust and generalizable bias mitigation models for language. Recognizing the limitations of existing datasets, we introduce ANUBIS, a novel dataset with 1507 carefully curated sentence pairs encompassing nine social bias categories. We evaluate state-of-the-art models like T5, utilizing Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (PPO, DPO), and In-Context Learning (ICL) for effective bias mitigation. Our analysis focuses on multi-class social bias reduction, cross-dataset generalizability, and environmental impact of the trained models. ANUBIS and our findings offer valuable resources for building more equitable AI systems and contribute to the development of responsible and unbiased technologies with broad societal impact.

4.1LGOct 23, 2025
Competition is the key: A Game Theoretic Causal Discovery Approach

Amartya Roy, Souvik Chakraborty

Causal discovery remains a central challenge in machine learning, yet existing methods face a fundamental gap: algorithms like GES and GraN-DAG achieve strong empirical performance but lack finite-sample guarantees, while theoretically principled approaches fail to scale. We close this gap by introducing a game-theoretic reinforcement learning framework for causal discovery, where a DDQN agent directly competes against a strong baseline (GES or GraN-DAG), always warm-starting from the opponent's solution. This design yields three provable guarantees: the learned graph is never worse than the opponent, warm-starting strictly accelerates convergence, and most importantly, with high probability the algorithm selects the true best candidate graph. To the best of our knowledge, our result makes a first-of-its-kind progress in explaining such finite-sample guarantees in causal discovery: on synthetic SEMs (30 nodes), the observed error probability decays with n, tightly matching theory. On real-world benchmarks including Sachs, Asia, Alarm, Child, Hepar2, Dream, and Andes, our method consistently improves upon GES and GraN-DAG while remaining theoretically safe. Remarkably, it scales to large graphs such as Hepar2 (70 nodes), Dream (100 nodes), and Andes (220 nodes). Together, these results establish a new class of RL-based causal discovery algorithms that are simultaneously provably consistent, sample-efficient, and practically scalable, marking a decisive step toward unifying empirical performance with rigorous finite-sample theory.

4.1LGSep 28, 2025
Guide: Generalized-Prior and Data Encoders for DAG Estimation

Amartya Roy, Devharish N, Shreya Ganguly et al.

Modern causal discovery methods face critical limitations in scalability, computational efficiency, and adaptability to mixed data types, as evidenced by benchmarks on node scalability (30, $\le 50$, $\ge 70$ nodes), computational energy demands, and continuous/non-continuous data handling. While traditional algorithms like PC, GES, and ICA-LiNGAM struggle with these challenges, exhibiting prohibitive energy costs for higher-order nodes and poor scalability beyond 70 nodes, we propose \textbf{GUIDE}, a framework that integrates Large Language Model (LLM)-generated adjacency matrices with observational data through a dual-encoder architecture. GUIDE uniquely optimizes computational efficiency, reducing runtime on average by $\approx 42%$ compared to RL-BIC and KCRL methods, while achieving an average $\approx 117%$ improvement in accuracy over both NOTEARS and GraN-DAG individually. During training, GUIDE's reinforcement learning agent dynamically balances reward maximization (accuracy) and penalty avoidance (DAG constraints), enabling robust performance across mixed data types and scalability to $\ge 70$ nodes -- a setting where baseline methods fail.