{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/counterfactual-maximum-likelihood-estimation","title":"Counterfactual Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Training Deep Networks","arxiv_id":"2106.03831","date":"2021-06-07","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2021 12","authors":["Xinyi Wang","Wenhu Chen","Michael Saxon","William Yang Wang"],"abstract":"Although deep learning models have driven state-of-the-art performance on a wide array of tasks, they are prone to spurious correlations that should not be learned as predictive clues. To mitigate this problem, we propose a causality-based training framework to reduce the spurious correlations caused by observed confounders. We give theoretical analysis on the underlying general Structural Causal Model (SCM) and propose to perform Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) on the interventional distribution instead of the observational distribution, namely Counterfactual Maximum Likelihood Estimation (CMLE). As the interventional distribution, in general, is hidden from the observational data, we then derive two different upper bounds of the expected negative log-likelihood and propose two general algorithms, Implicit CMLE and Explicit CMLE, for causal predictions of deep learning models using observational data. We conduct experiments on both simulated data and two real-world tasks: Natural Language Inference (NLI) and Image Captioning. The results show that CMLE methods outperform the regular MLE method in terms of out-of-domain generalization performance and reducing spurious correlations, while maintaining comparable performance on the regular evaluations.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.03831v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.03831v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"counterfactual-maximum-likelihood-estimation","repo_url":"https://github.com/WANGXinyiLinda/CMLE","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"jax","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"domain-generalization","task_name":"Domain Generalization"},{"task_slug":"image-captioning","task_name":"Image Captioning"},{"task_slug":"natural-language-inference","task_name":"Natural Language Inference"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"counterfactual"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2106.03831","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2106.03831"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/WANGXinyiLinda/CMLE","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"fd84c4c1fbb05298","entry":"CounterFactualIPM","repo":"WANGXinyiLinda/CMLE","repo_kind":"official","path":"IC/captioning/modules/losses.py","file_url":"https://github.com/WANGXinyiLinda/CMLE/blob/HEAD/IC/captioning/modules/losses.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"fd84c4c1fbb05298"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}