arXiv subjects

Seyedeh Baharan Khatami

Publications and source records attributed to Seyedeh Baharan Khatami.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Residual Skill Optimization for Text-to-SQL Ensembles

Text-to-SQL ensembles improve over single-candidate generation by drawing multiple SQL candidates and selecting one, but their effectiveness is bounded by Pass@K, the probability that at least one of K candidates is correct. Existing methods source diversity heuristically through stochastic decoding or prompt variants, leaving candidate sets dominated by correlated failures. We present DivSkill-SQL, a residual skill optimization framework that builds complementary agentic Text-to-SQL ensembles without model fine-tuning: each new skill is optimized on examples the current skill ensemble fails on, provably targeting its marginal contribution to Pass@K. On Spider2-Lite, DivSkill-SQL improves selected accuracy by up to +11.1 points on Snowflake and +8.3 on BigQuery over the strongest ensemble baseline, with consistent gains across two base models (Opus-4.6 and GPT-5.4). Skills optimized on a single dialect transfer without retraining across dialects (Snowflake, BigQuery, SQLite) and to a different task formulation, such as BIRD-Critic (+2.6 pts). Error diagnostics show up to 3x fewer hallucinated schema references and function calls, indicating that gains come from genuinely reliable complementary skills rather than surface-form variation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Graph Machine Learning based Doubly Robust Estimator for Network Causal Effects

We address the challenge of inferring causal effects in social network data. This results in challenges due to interference -- where a unit's outcome is affected by neighbors' treatments -- and network-induced confounding factors. While there is extensive literature focusing on estimating causal effects in social network setups, a majority of them make prior assumptions about the form of network-induced confounding mechanisms. Such strong assumptions are rarely likely to hold especially in high-dimensional networks. We propose a novel methodology that combines graph machine learning approaches with the double machine learning framework to enable accurate and efficient estimation of direct and peer effects using a single observational social network. We demonstrate the semiparametric efficiency of our proposed estimator under mild regularity conditions, allowing for consistent uncertainty quantification. We demonstrate that our method is accurate, robust, and scalable via an extensive simulation study. We use our method to investigate the impact of Self-Help Group participation on financial risk tolerance.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Scalable Out-of-distribution Robustness in the Presence of Unobserved Confounders

We consider the task of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, where the distribution shift is due to an unobserved confounder ($Z$) affecting both the covariates ($X$) and the labels ($Y$). This confounding introduces heterogeneity in the predictor, i.e., $P(Y | X) = E_{P(Z | X)}[P(Y | X,Z)]$, making traditional covariate and label shift assumptions unsuitable. OOD generalization differs from traditional domain adaptation in that it does not assume access to the covariate distribution ($X^\text{te}$) of the test samples during training. These conditions create a challenging scenario for OOD robustness: (a) $Z^\text{tr}$ is an unobserved confounder during training, (b) $P^\text{te}(Z) \neq P^\text{tr}(Z)$, (c) $X^\text{te}$ is unavailable during training, and (d) the predictive distribution depends on $P^\text{te}(Z)$. While prior work has developed complex predictors requiring multiple additional variables for identifiability of the latent distribution, we explore a set of identifiability assumptions that yield a surprisingly simple predictor using only a single additional variable. Our approach demonstrates superior empirical performance on several benchmark tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Towards Robust Offline Evaluation: A Causal and Information Theoretic Framework for Debiasing Ranking Systems

Evaluating retrieval-ranking systems is crucial for developing high-performing models. While online A/B testing is the gold standard, its high cost and risks to user experience require effective offline methods. However, relying on historical interaction data introduces biases-such as selection, exposure, conformity, and position biases-that distort evaluation metrics, driven by the Missing-Not-At-Random (MNAR) nature of user interactions and favoring popular or frequently exposed items over true user preferences. We propose a novel framework for robust offline evaluation of retrieval-ranking systems, transforming MNAR data into Missing-At-Random (MAR) through reweighting combined with black-box optimization, guided by neural estimation of information-theoretic metrics. Our contributions include (1) a causal formulation for addressing offline evaluation biases, (2) a system-agnostic debiasing framework, and (3) empirical validation of its effectiveness. This framework enables more accurate, fair, and generalizable evaluations, enhancing model assessment before deployment.

cs.IR↗