Publications

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Neural Posterior Estimation of Terrain Parameters from Radar Sounder Data Dal Corso, J., Kofler, A., Cortellazzi, M., Bruzzone, L., Schölkopf, B. IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), August 2026 (Accepted) arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Echoes of the Prior: A Computational Phenomenology of Forgetting Gao, G., Schölkopf, B., Geiger, A. Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques: PACM-CGIT, SIGGRAPH, July 2026 (Accepted) Project BibTeX

Empirische Inferenz Conference Paper On the Emergence and Test-Time Use of Structural Information in Large Language Models Chen, M. C., Miller, M., Schölkopf, B., Guo, S. 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), July 2026 (Accepted) arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Differentiable Simulation of Hard Contacts with Soft Gradients for Learning and Control Paulus*, A., Geist*, A. R., Schumacher*, P., Rappenecker, S., Musil, V., Martius, G. The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2026, *equal contribution (Published) arXiv URL BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Estimating Joint Interventional Distributions from Marginal Interventional Data Garrido Mejia, S., Kirschbaum, E., Kekić, A., Schölkopf, B., Mastakouri, A. A. Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning, 323:1-23, PMLR, 5th Conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning, April 2026 (To be published) arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Learning Nonlinear Causal Reductions to Explain Reinforcement Learning Policies Kekić, A., Schneider, J., Büchler, D., Schölkopf*, B., Besserve*, M. The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2026, *joint supervision (Published) arXiv URL BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Proper Velocity Neural Networks Chen*, Z., Su*, Z., Schölkopf, B., Sebe, N. The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2026, *equal contribution (Published) URL BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Rigidity-Aware Geometric Pretraining for Protein Design and Conformational Ensembles Ni*, Z., Li*, Y., Qiu*, Z., Schölkopf, B., Guo, H., Liu, W., Liu, S. The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2026, *equal contribution (Published) arXiv URL BibTeX

Empirical Inference Deep Models and Optimization Conference Paper Scaling Behavior of Discrete Diffusion Language Models von Rütte, D., Fluri, J., Pooladzandi, O., Schölkopf, B., Hofmann, T., Orvieto, A. The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2026 (Published) arXiv URL BibTeX

Empirical Inference Robust Machine Learning Conference Paper Skill Learning via Policy Diversity Yields Identifiable Representations for Reinforcement Learning Reizinger*, P., Mucsányi*, B., Guo*, S., Eysenbach, B., Schölkopf, B., Brendel, W. The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2026, *equal contribution (Published) arXiv URL BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper SocialHarmBench: Revealing LLM Vulnerabilities to Socially Harmful Requests Pandey, P. S., Le, H. S., Bhardwaj, D., Mihalcea, R., Zhijing, J. The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2026 (Published) arXiv URL BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Sim-to-Real for Muscle-Actuated Robots via Learned Actuator Models Schneider, J., Mahajan, M., Chen, L., Guist, S., Schölkopf, B., Posner, I., Büchler, D. 2nd German Robotics Conference (GRC), March 2026 (Published) URL BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper A data and task-constrained mechanistic model of the mouse outer retina shows robustness to contrast variations Kadhim, K. L., Beck, J., Huang, Z., Macke, J. H., Rieke, F., Euler, T., Deistler, M., Berens, P. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025), 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, December 2025 (Accepted) bioRxiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Are Language Models Efficient Reasoners? A Perspective from Logic Programming Opedal, A., Zengaffinen, Y., Shirakami, H., Pasti, C., Sachan, M., Saparov, A., Cotterell, R., Schölkopf, B. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025), 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, December 2025 (Accepted) arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper CauSciBench: Assessing LLM Causal Reasoning for Scientific Research Acharya, S., Zhang, T. J., Kim, A., Haghighat, A., Sun, X., Shrestha, R. B., Mordig, M., Danisman, F., Jose, C., Qi, Y., Cobben, P., Schölkopf, B., Sachan, M., Jin, Z. NeurIPS 2025: 5th Workshop on Mathematical Reasoning and AI (Math-AI) and CauScien Workshop, December 2025 (Published) URL BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Counterfactual reasoning: an analysis of in-context emergence Miller, M., Schölkopf, B., Guo, S. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025), 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, December 2025 (Accepted) arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Cultural Alien Sampler: Open-ended art generation balancing originality and coherence Hernandez, A., Yakura, H., Brinkmann, L., Sola, M. C., Alhaija, H. A., Serna, I., Rahaman, N., Schölkopf, B., Rahwan, I. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025), 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, Creative AI Track, December 2025 (Accepted) arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Do-PFN: In-Context Learning for Causal Effect Estimation Robertson*, J., Reuter*, A., Guo, S., Hollmann, N., Hutter, F., Schölkopf, B. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025), 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, December 2025, *equal contribution (Accepted) arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Effortless, Simulation-Efficient Bayesian Inference using Tabular Foundation Models Vetter, J., Gloeckler, M., Gedon, D., Macke, J. H. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025), 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, December 2025 (Accepted) arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper FNOPE: Simulation-based inference on function spaces with Fourier Neural Operators Moss, G., Muhle, L. S., Drews, R., Macke, J. H., Schröder, C. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025), 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, December 2025 (Accepted) arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Identifying multi-compartment Hodgkin-Huxley models with high-density extracellular voltage recordings Tanoh, I. C., Deistler, M., Macke, J. H., Linderman, S. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025), 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, December 2025 (Accepted) arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Reparameterized LLM Training via Orthogonal Equivalence Transformation Qiu, Z., Buchholz, S., Xiao, T., Dax, M., Schölkopf, B., Liu, W. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025), 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, December 2025 (Accepted) arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Root Cause Analysis of Outliers with Missing Structural Knowledge Orchard, W. R., Okati, N., Garrido Mejia, S., Blöbaum, P., Janzing, D. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025), 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, December 2025 (Accepted) arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper SPARTAN: A Sparse Transformer World Model Attending to What Matters Lei, A., Schölkopf, B., Posner, I. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025), 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, December 2025 (Accepted) arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Improving Large Language Model Safety with Contrastive Representation Learning Simko, S., Sachan, M., Schölkopf, B., Jin, Z. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 28166-28194, (Editors: Christodoulopoulos, Christos and Chakraborty, Tanmoy and Rose, Carolyn and Peng, Violet), Association for Computational Linguistics, November 2025 (Published) arXiv DOI URL BibTeX

Empirical Inference Deep Models and Optimization Conference Paper Generalized Interpolating Discrete Diffusion von Rütte, D., Fluri, J., Ding, Y., Orvieto, A., Schölkopf, B., Hofmann, T. Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 267:61810-61843, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Singh, Aarti and Fazel, Maryam and Hsu, Daniel and Lacoste-Julien, Simon and Berkenkamp, Felix and Maharaj, Tegan and Wagstaff, Kiri and Zhu, Jerry), PMLR, International Conference on Machine Learning, July 2025 (Published) arXiv URL BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Generative Intervention Models for Causal Perturbation Modeling Schneider, N., Lorch, L., Kilbertus, N., Schölkopf, B., Krause, A. Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 267:53388-53412, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Singh, Aarti and Fazel, Maryam and Hsu, Daniel and Lacoste-Julien, Simon and Berkenkamp, Felix and Maharaj, Tegan and Wagstaff, Kiri and Zhu, Jerry), PMLR, International Conference on Machine Learning, July 2025 (Published) arXiv URL BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Learning Joint Interventional Effects from Single-Variable Interventions in Additive Models Kekić, A., Garrido Mejia, S., Schölkopf, B. Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 267:29651-29669, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Singh, Aarti and Fazel, Maryam and Hsu, Daniel and Lacoste-Julien, Simon and Berkenkamp, Felix and Maharaj, Tegan and Wagstaff, Kiri and Zhu, Jerry), PMLR, International Conference on Machine Learning, July 2025 (Published) arXiv URL BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Position: Probabilistic Modelling is Sufficient for Causal Inference Mlodozeniec, B. K., Krueger, D., Turner, R. E. Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 267:81810-81840, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Singh, Aarti and Fazel, Maryam and Hsu, Daniel and Lacoste-Julien, Simon and Berkenkamp, Felix and Maharaj, Tegan and Wagstaff, Kiri and Zhu, Jerry), PMLR, International Conference on Machine Learning, July 2025 (Published) URL BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Progressive Tempering Sampler with Diffusion Rissanen*, S., OuYang*, R., He*, J., Chen, W., Heinonen, M., Solin, A., Hernández-Lobato, J. M. Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 267:51724-51746, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Singh, Aarti and Fazel, Maryam and Hsu, Daniel and Lacoste-Julien, Simon and Berkenkamp, Felix and Maharaj, Tegan and Wagstaff, Kiri and Zhu, Jerry), PMLR, International Conference on Machine Learning, July 2025, *equal contribution (Published) arXiv URL BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Scalable Gaussian Processes with Latent Kronecker Structure Lin, J. A., Ament, A., Balandat, M., Eriksson, D., Hernández-Lobato, J. M., Bakshy, E. Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 267:37730-37744, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Singh, Aarti and Fazel, Maryam and Hsu, Daniel and Lacoste-Julien, Simon and Berkenkamp, Felix and Maharaj, Tegan and Wagstaff, Kiri and Zhu, Jerry), PMLR, International Conference on Machine Learning, July 2025 (Published) arXiv URL BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Accuracy on the wrong line: On the pitfalls of noisy data for out-of-distribution generalisation Sanyal, A., Hu, Y., Yu, Y., Ma, Y., Wang, Y., Schölkopf, B. Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 258:2170-2178, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Li, Yingzhen and Mandt, Stephan and Agrawal, Shipra and Khan, Emtiyaz), PMLR, May 2025 (Published) URL BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Training Neural Samplers with Reverse Diffusive KL Divergence He*, J., Chen*, W., Zhang*, M., Barber, D., Hernández-Lobato, J. M. Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 258:5167-5175, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Li, Yingzhen and Mandt, Stephan and Agrawal, Shipra and Khan, Emtiyaz), PMLR, May 2025, *equal contribution (Published) URL BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Your Finetuned Large Language Model is Already a Powerful Out-of-distribution Detector Zhang, A., Xiao, T. Z., Liu, W., Bamler, R., Wischik, D. Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 258:2701-2709, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, (Editors: Li, Yingzhen and Mandt, Stephan and Agrawal, Shipra and Khan, Emtiyaz), PMLR, May 2025 (Published) URL BibTeX

Empirical Inference Autonomous Learning Conference Paper Advancing Out-of-Distribution Detection via Local Neuroplasticity Canevaro, A., Schmidt, J., Marvi, M. S., Yu, H., Martius, G., Jordan, J. The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2025 (Published) arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Perceiving Systems Conference Paper Can Large Language Models Understand Symbolic Graphics Programs? Qiu, Z., Liu, W., Feng, H., Liu, Z., Xiao, T. Z., Collins, K. M., Tenenbaum, J. B., Weller, A., Black, M. J., Schölkopf, B. The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2025 (Published)

Abstract ›

Against the backdrop of enthusiasm for large language models (LLMs), there is a growing need to scientifically assess their capabilities and shortcomings. This is nontrivial in part because it is difficult to find tasks which the models have not encountered during training. Utilizing symbolic graphics programs, we propose a domain well-suited to test multiple spatial-semantic reasoning skills of LLMs. Popular in computer graphics, these programs procedurally generate visual data. While LLMs exhibit impressive skills in general program synthesis and analysis, symbolic graphics programs offer a new layer of evaluation: they allow us to test an LLM’s ability to answer semantic questions about the images or 3D geometries without a vision encoder. To semantically understand the symbolic programs, LLMs would need to possess the ability to “imagine” and reason how the corresponding graphics content would look with only the symbolic description of the local curvatures and strokes. We use this task to evaluate LLMs by creating a large benchmark for the semantic visual understanding of symbolic graphics programs, built procedurally with minimal human effort. Particular emphasis is placed on transformations of images that leave the image level semantics invariant while introducing significant changes to the underlying program. We evaluate commercial and open-source LLMs on our benchmark to assess their ability to reason about visual output of programs, finding that LLMs considered stronger at reasoning generally perform better. Lastly, we introduce a novel method to improve this ability – Symbolic Instruction Tuning (SIT), in which the LLM is finetuned with pre-collected instruction data on symbolic graphics programs. Interestingly, we find that SIT not only improves LLM’s understanding on symbolic programs, but it also improves general reasoning ability on various other benchmarks.

arXiv Paper BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Compositional simulation-based inference for time series Gloeckler*, M., Toyota*, S., Fukumizu, K., Macke, J. H. The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2025 (Published) arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Learning and Dynamical Systems Conference Paper Conformal Generative Modeling with Improved Sample Efficiency through Sequential Greedy Filtering Kladny, K., Schölkopf, B., Muehlebach, M. The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2025 (Published) arXiv URL BibTeX

Empirical Inference Robust Machine Learning Conference Paper Cross-Entropy Is All You Need to Invert the Data Generating Process Reizinger*, P., Bizeul*, A., Juhos*, A., Vogt, J. E., Balestriero, R., Brendel, W., Klindt, D. The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2025, *Joint first authorship (Published) arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Differentially private steering for Large language model alignment Goel, A., Hu, Y., Gurevych, I., Sanyal, A. The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2025 (Published) arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Perceiving Systems Conference Paper Efficient Diversity-Preserving Diffusion Alignment via Gradient-Informed GFlowNets Liu, Z., Xiao, T. Z., Liu, W., Bengio, Y., Zhang, D. The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2025 (Published)

Abstract ›

While one commonly trains large diffusion models by collecting datasets on target downstream tasks, it is often desired to align and finetune pretrained diffusion models with some reward functions that are either designed by experts or learned from small-scale datasets. Existing post-training methods for reward finetuning of diffusion models typically suffer from lack of diversity in generated samples, lack of prior preservation, and/or slow convergence in finetuning. Inspired by recent successes in generative flow networks (GFlowNets), a class of probabilistic models that sample with the unnormalized density of a reward function, we propose a novel GFlowNet method dubbed Nabla-GFlowNet (abbreviated as ∇-GFlowNet), the first GFlowNet method that leverages the rich signal in reward gradients, together with an objective called ∇-DB plus its variant residual ∇-DB designed for prior-preserving diffusion finetuning. We show that our proposed method achieves fast yet diversity- and prior-preserving finetuning of Stable Diffusion, a large-scale text-conditioned image diffusion model, on different realistic reward functions.

arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Robust Machine Learning Conference Paper Identifiable Exchangeable Mechanisms for Causal Structure and Representation Learning Reizinger, P., Guo, S., Huszár, F., Schölkopf, B., Brendel, W. The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2025 (Published) arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Improving Probabilistic Diffusion Models With Optimal Covariance Matching Ou*, Z., Zhang*, M., Zhang, A., Xiao, T. Z., Li, Y., Barber, D. The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2025, *equal contribution (Published) arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Influence Functions for Scalable Data Attribution in Diffusion Models Mlodozeniec, B. K., Eschenhagen, R., Bae, J., Immer, A., Krueger, D., Turner, R. E. The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2025 (Published) arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Robust Machine Learning Conference Paper Interaction Asymmetry: A General Principle for Learning Composable Abstractions Brady, J., von Kügelgen, J., Lachapelle, S., Buchholz, S., Kipf*, T., Brendel*, W. The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2025, *joint senior author (Published) arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Language Model Alignment in Multilingual Trolley Problems Jin, Z., Kleiman-Weiner, M., Piatti, G., Levine, S., Liu, J., Gonzalez, F., Ortu, F., Strausz, A., Sachan, M., Mihalcea, R., Choi, Y., Schölkopf, B. The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2025 (Published) arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Autonomous Learning Conference Paper On the Transfer of Object-Centric Representation Learning Didolkar, A. R., Zadaianchuk, A., Goyal, A., Mozer, M. C., Bengio, Y., Martius*, G., Seitzer*, M. The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2025, *equal contribution (Published) URL BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Preference Elicitation for Offline Reinforcement Learning Pace, A., Schölkopf, B., Rätsch, G., Ramponi, G. The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2025 (Published) arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper Standardizing Structural Causal Models Ormaniec*, W., Sussex*, S., Lorch*, L., Schölkopf, B., Krause, A. The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2025, *equal contribution (Published) arXiv BibTeX

Empirical Inference Conference Paper The Directionality of Optimization Trajectories in Neural Networks Singh, S. P., He, B., Hofmann, T., Schölkopf, B. The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2025 (Published) URL BibTeX

Publications

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