Neural policies have shown promise in solving vehicle routing problems due to their reduced reliance on handcrafted heuristics. However, current training paradigms suffer from a fundamental limitation: they primarily focus on next-node prediction for solution construction, resulting in myopic decision-making that undermines long-horizon planning capacity. To this end, we introduce Multi-node Lookahead Prediction (MnLP), a novel training strategy that extends the supervised learning paradigm to predict multiple future nodes simultaneously. We incorporate causal and discardable MnLP modules that operate exclusively during training, facilitating models to anticipate multi-step decisions while preserving inference-time efficiency. By incorporating multi-depth auxiliary supervision into the loss function, MnLP equips neural policies with the ability of long-range contextual understanding. Experimentally, MnLP outperforms existing training methods, improving the generalization capability of neural policies across various problem sizes, distributions, and real-world benchmarks. Moreover, MnLP can be seamlessly integrated into diverse neural architectures without introducing additional inference overhead.
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Trajectory representation learning transforms trajectory data into low-dimensional embeddings for downstream analytics. Although trajectory data inherently contains rich spatiotemporal information that remains to be more deeply explored, recent approaches have increasingly favored integrating external multimodal information rather than deeply mining internal trajectory patterns, resulting in the underutilization of the significant potential inherent in spatiotemporal features. To address these issues, we propose SimTRL, a novel unimodal framework specifically designed for road network-based trajectory data. Specifically, we design a bi-directional mamba-traj encoder that leverages the linear computational efficiency of State Space Models to capture global non-causal topological dependencies, overcoming the limitations of traditional causal models. Furthermore, we introduce a context-aware time encoder mechanism to explicitly model dynamic time embeddings. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our model achieves average performance gains of 5.19%, 13.91%, 7.2%, and 2.69% across four tasks, respectively. Compared to multimodal models, our approach achieves an average improvement of 9.06% across all evaluation metrics, with a pre-training speedup of 11.2×. The source code of our model is available at https://github.com/sxgu1/SimTRL.
Current mainstream research in multivariate time series (MTS) forecasting often assumes that all data are static. However, real-world MTS data typically arrives continuously in a streaming manner, which we refer to as streaming MTS. The statistical characteristics and spatiotemporal graph topology of these data evolve over time, presenting two key challenges: the model's ability to adapt to new data distributions and the enhancement of cross-domain generalization capabilities. In this paper, we propose a streaming MTS prediction framework. We begin by designing a lightweight spatiotemporal causal learning model that captures generalizable causal spatiotemporal features from a decoupling perspective. Next, we introduce a framework to enhance the model's streaming learning capability, leveraging the adaptability of continual learning while strengthening cross-domain representation abilities. Specifically, we reformulate continual learning as a multi-task learning problem and present a multi-task optimization algorithm that identifies a set of Pareto-optimal solutions to address the inherent stability-plasticity dilemma in continual learning. Finally, we propose a topology-aware feature propagation strategy that disseminates well-trained node embedding features to unseen graph structures, thereby improving the model's cross-domain generalization. Results on real-world datasets demonstrate that our model achieves superior forecasting performance while substantially improving computational efficiency and memory usage.
Multivariate time series (MTS) classification is foundational to pervasive computing and financial analysis, yet existing multi-scale paradigms are often constrained by suboptimal representation fidelity. We identify two critical bottlenecks: temporal non-causality in standard encoders that induces temporal confounding in non-stationary dynamics, and the absence of explicit channel saliency mechanisms that allows noise to contaminate the latent space. To address these challenges, we propose the Causal Attention and Spatio-temporal Encoder Network (CASE-Net), an architecture designed for structural manifold pre-conditioning. CASE-Net synergizes a Causal Temporal Encoder, which enforces physical arrow-of-time constraints via masked self-attention and causal convolutions, with an Adaptive Channel Recalibration module functioning as an information bottleneck to suppress detrimental noise. Comprehensive evaluations across six heterogeneous domains demonstrate that CASE-Net establishes new state-of-the-art benchmarks on four tasks, achieving a peak accuracy of 98.6% on the AWR dataset and superior robustness in non-stationary regimes.
Accurate estimation of time-varying treatment effects is crucial for optimizing interventions in personalized medicine. However, observational data often contains complex confounding bias and temporal complexities, making counterfactual estimation challenging. We propose Counterfactual Estimation via Temporal-Aware Intervention Networks (TAIN), a novel model that introduces an Intervention-aware Functional Convolution kernel to emphasize the role of treatments and capture complex temporal treatment interactions. TAIN addresses confounding bias from a domain generalization perspective, approximating the unknown target domain using adversarial examples and incorporating Sharpness-Aware Minimization to derive a generalization bound. This approach is more suitable for longitudinal settings compared to existing methods inspired by domain adaptation techniques due to inherent differences between static and longitudinal contexts. Experiments on simulated datasets demonstrate TAIN's superior performance compared to state-of-the-art models for counterfactual estimation over time.
Knowledge editing is pivotal for efficiently updating the parametric memory of Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling them to function as evolving agents in dynamic environments. However, mainstream in-parameter knowledge editing approaches suffer from Subject-Dominant Memory Interference: modifying a specific fact inadvertently corrupts the broader structural knowledge associated with the same subject within LLMs. We diagnose the root cause as a shortcut learning pathology, where the optimization objective overfits subject representations while bypassing the essential relational context. To rectify this, we propose Causal Path Alignment (CPA), a principled framework designed to anchor the optimization trajectory to valid causal pathways. CPA enforces parameter updates to route through relation-aware intermediate states, thereby preventing the erasure of contextual dependencies. Experimental results across diverse LLM backbones demonstrate that CPA consistently eliminates the shortcut, significantly improving relation specificity while exhibiting minimal side-effects. Moreover, CPA serves as a model-agnostic plug-in for existing editors, paving the way for reliable and trustworthy in-parameter knowledge editing.
Deploying Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) in real-world surveillance faces a fundamental tension between the demand for high-level semantics to ensure effectiveness and the limited computational resources of edge devices. Vision–Language Models (VLMs) provide rich open-vocabulary semantics, but their latency and computational cost preclude on-device deployment. To address the challenge, we propose MemoVAD, an edge–cloud collaborative framework that selectively incorporates VLM semantics into streaming VAD. MemoVAD runs most inference on the edge with a lightweight detector and a causal Temporal Context Encoder (TCE) to model temporal dependencies. Specifically, we introduce an Uncertainty-Aware Gating (UAG) policy grounded in Subjective Logic to model perceived uncertainty and query the cloud-based VLM only for high-uncertainty and semantically novel clips. Besides, a Dynamic Semantic Memory (DSM) is designed to cache VLM-verified prototypes for efficient retrieval, enabling the edge model to progressively incorporate VLM-level semantics via a semantic adapter. Experiments on UCF-Crime and XD-Violence datasets via a real edge device show that MemoVAD substantially reduces communication overhead while surpassing state-of-the-art performance. The demo video is available at: https://memovad2026.github.io/.
In many real-world scenarios, agents operate across heterogeneous environments where the underlying dynamics and data-generating processes vary. Standard reinforcement learning and imitation learning methods often fail in such settings as they typically assume stationarity and learn policies that overfit to environment-specific correlations. A key challenge is the presence of spurious correlations as observed states often contain both causal and non-causal features, with the latter introducing environment-specific biases that undermine generalization. To address this problem, we propose DropConnect-based Causal Imitation Learning (DCIL), a novel offline imitation learning framework designed to identify and exploit stable causal mechanisms across diverse environments. DCIL introduces a gradient alignment constraint that encourages the policy to align with causal structures shared across training environments. To further mitigate overfitting to spurious correlations, DCIL involves DropConnect-based regularization, injecting stochastic perturbations into network weights to simulate parameter uncertainty and reduce reliance on unstable features. We evaluate DCIL on synthetic benchmarks derived from OpenAI Gym control tasks, where non-causal features exhibiting spurious correlations are explicitly injected to simulate environmental heterogeneity. Experimental results show that DCIL outperforms state-of-the-art imitation learning baselines, achieving superior generalization to unseen environments. These findings highlight the importance of incorporating causal reasoning and structured regularization into policy learning for robust performance under environment shift.
Partial order causal link (POCL) planning offers rich structural representations for plan optimization. However, under the classical threat definition, POCL plans form a strict subset of valid partial-order (PO) plans. This gap limits existing POCL optimization techniques to a restricted subspace of PO solutions. We revisit 'white knight' threat semantics, which permit a causal link to persist across a threat provided the deleted condition is re-established by an intermediate producer. We prove that under this definition, the POCL and PO solution spaces become equivalent. By extending a MaxSAT-based optimization framework, we demonstrate that white knights are theoretically necessary for completeness and practically advantageous: they yield plans with significantly fewer ordering constraints in domains with complex causal interference while maintaining computational tractability on standard benchmarks.
Brain effective connectivity (EC) characterizes directional causal interactions among brain regions. However, learning stable and directionally explicit EC networks from multimodal data remains challenging. In practice, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) differ substantially in spatio-temporal resolution and noise characteristics. Existing methods often rely on manual spatio-temporal alignment and tend to recover only partial causal structures under high noise and Bayesian equivalence classes. To address these challenges, we propose a spatio-temporal constrained Bayesian causal network for multimodal brain effective connectivity learning (STCBN-EC). First, STCBN-EC constructs an anatomically guided EEG–fMRI spatial mapping and derives a unified spatio-temporal representation through slice-level alignment and adaptive modality fusion. Then, a Bayesian causal network is employed to model nonlinear inter-regional dependencies, where uncertainty-driven surrogate scoring is used to evaluate candidate structures. Finally, multimodal representation learning and EC structure estimation are jointly optimized via a gradient-free global optimization strategy. Experiments on simulated and real EEG–fMRI datasets demonstrate that STCBN-EC outperforms state-of-the-art methods and effectively captures state-dependent directional interactions among brain regions.
Reward learning via human feedback is a crucial capability for beneficial AI. Current methods are built on decision-making theories that assume a matched dynamics model between the learning agent and the feedback provider. However, humans often form imperfect internal dynamics models, and their feedback reflects these misconceptions. While this relationship has long been hypothesised, its manifestation in sequential decision-making remains largely an assumption. Our work provides the first comprehensive empirical investigation of this relationship through a randomized controlled trial (N=211). We followed a two-stage design where we first initialized the participants' understanding of the dynamics in a grid-world navigation domain and then manipulated it using text-based instructions. Causal mediation analysis revealed that humans' internal models play a mediating role in feedback behaviour. We show that this relationship is invariant across visual contexts and is robust to three common feedback types: pairwise preferences, trajectory corrections, and off-switch interventions. These findings confirm a critical limitation of current reward learning methods and establish the missing psychological foundation for approaches that incorporate dynamics understanding.
Existing AI-generated image (AIGI) detectors perform well in-domain but degrade severely under distribution shift. We observe that this failure is mainly caused by content shortcuts, where detectors spuriously couple forgery artifacts with semantic content, such as object categories or demographic attributes, learning content–label correlations instead of generalizable forgery patterns. To address this issue, we propose PURE (Purging Unrelated Representations for Content-Agnostic Forgery Detection), which achieves content-agnostic detection through two complementary components: a Causal Semantic Generative (CSG) mechanism that disentangles semantic representations from forgery-irrelevant nuisance factors, and a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based prototype alignment module that suppresses category-specific content bias. Extensive experiments on CIFAKE, GenImage, and AlFace show that PURE achieves superior generalization under spurious correlation reversal. The code is available at https://github.com/wuxinyu519/PURE.
We examine how causal beliefs affect an agent's choices and how feedback on those choices leads to updated causal beliefs. Building on the structural-equations framework for modeling causality, we first examine the general problem of updating causal beliefs in the face of novel (and possibly inexplicable) data. We model an agent who is uncertain of the true causal model, and therefore entertains a probabilistic belief over the set of possible models. We then consider how causal beliefs influence choices by building a model of agency and utility on top of the usual structural-equations framework. Using these two components, we propose a notion of steady state, where the feedback received from an agent's optimal action, given her current beliefs about the true causal model, can be rationalized by those beliefs.
Dynamic graph neural networks (DyGNNs) are widely used to model evolving interactions, but may fail under data distribution shift. Due to limited and unreliable interventions and insufficient disentanglement, the existing dynamic graph domain generalization approaches lead to suboptimal results. We formalize a message sufficiency causal view: a node representation is fully mediated by its received message multiset. Building on this perspective, we propose Latent environment Extrapolation and Message Disentanglement (LEMD), a novel robust representation learning framework for dynamic graph domain generalization. A message extrapolation mechanism under soft uncertainty constraints is proposed to obtain the diverse counterfactual message distributions. Causal information is disentangled fully from the messages to suppress shortcuts via a recoverable evolving disentanglement module. We further provide rigorous theoretical analysis and proofs to ensure the effectiveness of LEMD. Across all six datasets and two tasks, LEMD consistently improves over state-of-the-art dynamic graph generalization baselines under distribution shift, and achieves the best performance increase of 7.7% relative compared to the suboptimal baseline. The code of LEMD for reviewer is available at https://github.com/W-WuJi/LEMD.
Optimization in industrial systems often involves calibrating from a semi-optimized state, where global exploration methods like Reinforcement Learning (RL) or Bayesian Optimization (BO) are inefficient or unsafe. We propose Causal Newton Optimization (CNO), an online algorithm that iteratively calibrates inputs under a known causal graph but unknown structural equations. CNO estimates local linear causal effects via additive interventions and employs a log-linear variance regression to robustly guide Newton-based updates. Evaluations on synthetic systems and a chemical plant simulator demonstrate that CNO achieves the best balance between objective improvement and robustness. While traditional PID control suits standard dynamical systems, CNO significantly outperforms RL and BO in complex structural causal models, providing the robust stability vital for safety-critical real-world applications.
With the rising demand for trustworthy AI in clinical practice, strong interpretability is now a critical requirement as well as accuracy. However, the modality gap for medical visual question answering is quite severe when continuous visual signals are forcibly projected into discrete text space for reasoning, and the loss of necessary diagnostic information leads to low precision and black-box opacity. To address this problem, we propose MedVCoT, which incorporates latent visual reasoning into the medical visual question answering(VQA) domain. Rather than merely integrating modules, MedVCoT utilizes the specialized expertise of MedSAM to train a large vision-language model so that it can autonomously generate consistent and continuous latent visual tokens within Visual Chain-of-Thought. This mechanism forces the model to explicitly "see" the lesion in the latent space before formulating a textual diagnosis, ensuring answers are causally rooted in verifiable visual evidence rather than statistical hallucination. We achieve this through a progressive 3-stage training procedure: medical feature alignment, visual reasoning learning by utilizing latent tokens generated, and instruction tuning for complex clinical scenarios. Extensive experiments show that MedVCoT can achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks, outperforming other methods by large margins. Meanwhile, it provides pixel-level segmentation masks to validate its diagnostic reasoning. Our demo is available at https://zhuqh19.github.io/MedVCoT.
Optimizing survival outcomes, such as patient survival or customer retention, is a critical objective in data-driven decision-making. Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) provides a powerful framework for assessing such decision-making policies using logged data alone, without the need for costly or risky online experiments in high-stakes applications. However, typical estimators are not designed to handle right-censored survival outcomes, as they ignore unobserved survival times beyond the censoring time, leading to systematic underestimation of the true policy performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework for OPE and Off-Policy Learning (OPL) tailored for survival outcomes under censoring. Specifically, we introduce IPCW-IPS and IPCW-DR, which employ the Inverse Probability of Censoring Weighting technique to explicitly deal with censoring bias. We theoretically establish that our estimators are unbiased and that IPCW-DR achieves double robustness, ensuring consistency if either the propensity score or the outcome model is correct. Furthermore, we extend this framework to constrained OPL to optimize policy value under budget constraints. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods through simulation studies and illustrate their practical impacts using public real-world data for both evaluation and learning tasks.
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents often struggle to generalize to new tasks and contexts without updating their parameters, mainly because their learned representations and policies are overfit to the specifics of their training environments. To boost agents' in-context RL (ICRL) ability, this work formulates ICRL as a two-agent emergent communication problem and introduces CORAL (Communicative Representation for Adaptive RL), a framework that learns a transferable communicative context by functionally separating latent representation learning from control. In CORAL, an Information Agent (IA) is pre-trained as a world model on a diverse distribution of tasks. Its objective is not direct return maximization, but world modeling and distilling its understanding into concise messages. The emergent communication protocol is shaped by a novel Causal Influence Loss, which measures the effect that the message has on the next action. During deployment, the previously trained IA serves as a fixed contextualizer for a new Control Agent (CA), which learns to solve tasks by interpreting the provided communicative context. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach enables the CA to achieve significant gains in sample efficiency and successfully perform zero-shot adaptation with the help of pre-trained IA in diverse online and offline environments, validating the efficacy of learning a transferable communicative representation.
Event Causality Identification (ECI) is a crucial task in knowledge discovery that extracts structured causal relationships between annotated event mentions from unstructured text. However, existing approaches typically rely on extensive labeled data, which is scarce for specialized domains and topics. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong promise for few-shot and zero-shot information extraction, they are prone to “causal hallucination,” generating unreliable and spurious causal links. To address these limitations, we propose LLM-SD (Large Language Model Self-Debate), a novel framework that formulates ECI as a structured debate among multiple identical instances of a single LLM. Causality is determined through the integration of adversarial evidence. The framework employs LLMs in distinct roles: an affirmative team argues for the existence of causality, a negative team argues against it, and an adjudication committee evaluates the evidence for determination. An evidence strength grading rule guides the quantification and integration of adversarial evidence. The automatic and LLM-driven verification finally produce a reasoned verdict for event causality. LLM-SD reduces spurious causal links resulting from causal hallucination in LLMs and identifies more long-distance causalities by promoting a balanced evaluation of arguments. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that LLM-SD achieves state-of-the-art performance in a zero-shot setting.
Causal agents have emerged as promising tools for automating causal analysis based on user queries. However, existing causal agent systems are often limited to a single causal task, limiting their ability to handle complex queries. In addition, they accept only numerical data as input, preventing the integration of domain knowledge expressed in natural language. To overcome these limitations, we propose the OrcheCause agent, a causal agent leveraging textual knowledge for end-to-end causal inference. Specifically, OrcheCause is designed to orchestrate a sequence of interrelated causal tasks in response to user queries. Furthermore, OrcheCause supports diverse data types—numerical as well as textual data—by extracting cause-effect pairs from the relevant sources and incorporating them into causal discovery (CD), thereby improving the performance of CD. OrcheCause also introduces a metric-based hyperparameter optimization framework for CD when ground-truth graphs are not available.