Vahid Balazadeh Meresht

dblp:258/3369 · DBLP profile ↗
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3ranked-venue papers
3as first author
3since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 3 · 3 first-author · 3 since 2021

Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.

Artificial intelligence
3 papers
Probabilistic and Bayesian machine learning · 59% Reinforcement learning · 21% Language models and text generation · 12%

Topics — the 9 heaviest of 9, each with the papers that count most for it

TopicWeightPapersLastEvidence papers
Machine learning › Probabilistic and Bayesian machine learning
causal inference
1.422025
CausalPFN: Amortized Causal Effect Estimation via In-Context Learning · NeurIPS 2025
Partial Identification of Treatment Effects with Implicit Generative Models · NeurIPS 2022
Machine learning › Probabilistic and Bayesian machine learning › causal inference
causal effect estimation
0.912025
CausalPFN: Amortized Causal Effect Estimation via In-Context Learning · NeurIPS 2025
Natural language and speech › Language models and text generation
in-context learning
0.912025
CausalPFN: Amortized Causal Effect Estimation via In-Context Learning · NeurIPS 2025
Machine learning › Probabilistic and Bayesian machine learning › stochastic processes › gaussian process › neural processes
prior-data fitted networks
0.912025
CausalPFN: Amortized Causal Effect Estimation via In-Context Learning · NeurIPS 2025
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
imitation learning
0.812024
Sequential Decision Making with Expert Demonstrations under Unobserved Heterogeneity · NeurIPS 2024
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
meta-reinforcement learning
0.812024
Sequential Decision Making with Expert Demonstrations under Unobserved Heterogeneity · NeurIPS 2024
Machine learning › Generative modeling
implicit generative model
0.612022
Partial Identification of Treatment Effects with Implicit Generative Models · NeurIPS 2022
Machine learning › Probabilistic and Bayesian machine learning › causal inference › causal effect identification
partial identification
0.612022
Partial Identification of Treatment Effects with Implicit Generative Models · NeurIPS 2022
Machine learning › Probabilistic and Bayesian machine learning › causal inference › causal effect estimation
treatment effect estimation
0.612022
Partial Identification of Treatment Effects with Implicit Generative Models · NeurIPS 2022

Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics

transformer · 0.9bayesian causal inference · 0.9amortized inference · 0.9posterior sampling · 0.8empirical bayes · 0.8behavior cloning · 0.8uniform average treatment derivative · 0.6structural causal model · 0.6average treatment effect · 0.6
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 CausalPFN: Amortized Causal Effect Estimation via In-Context Learning
abstract
Causal effect estimation from observational data is fundamental across various applications. However, selecting an appropriate estimator from dozens of specialized methods demands substantial manual effort and domain expertise. We present CausalPFN, a single transformer that *amortizes* this workflow: trained once on a large library of simulated data-generating processes that satisfy ignorability, it infers causal effects for new observational datasets out of the box. CausalPFN combines ideas from Bayesian causal inference with the large-scale training protocol of prior-fitted networks (PFNs), learning to map raw observations directly to causal effects without any task-specific adjustment. Our approach achieves superior average performance on heterogeneous and average treatment effect estimation benchmarks (IHDP, Lalonde, ACIC). Moreover, it shows competitive performance for real-world policy making on uplift modeling tasks. CausalPFN provides calibrated uncertainty estimates to support reliable decision-making based on Bayesian principles. This ready-to-use model requires no further training or tuning and takes a step toward automated causal inference (https://github.com/vdblm/CausalPFN/).
Vahid Balazadeh Meresht, Hamidreza Kamkari, Valentin Thomas, Junwei Ma, Bingru Li, Jesse C. Cresswell, Rahul G. Krishnan
NeurIPS1
2024 Sequential Decision Making with Expert Demonstrations under Unobserved Heterogeneity
abstract
We study the problem of online sequential decision-making given auxiliary demonstrations from _experts_ who made their decisions based on unobserved contextual information. These demonstrations can be viewed as solving related but slightly different tasks than what the learner faces. This setting arises in many application domains, such as self-driving cars, healthcare, and finance, where expert demonstrations are made using contextual information, which is not recorded in the data available to the learning agent. We model the problem as a zero-shot meta-reinforcement learning setting with an unknown task distribution and a Bayesian regret minimization objective, where the unobserved tasks are encoded as parameters with an unknown prior. We propose the Experts-as-Priors algorithm (ExPerior), an empirical Bayes approach that utilizes expert data to establish an informative prior distribution over the learner's decision-making problem. This prior enables the application of any Bayesian approach for online decision-making, such as posterior sampling. We demonstrate that our strategy surpasses existing behaviour cloning and online algorithms, as well as online-offline baselines for multi-armed bandits, Markov decision processes (MDPs), and partially observable MDPs, showcasing the broad reach and utility of ExPerior in using expert demonstrations across different decision-making setups.
Vahid Balazadeh Meresht, Keertana Chidambaram, Viet Nguyen, Rahul G. Krishnan, Vasilis Syrgkanis
NeurIPS1
2022 Partial Identification of Treatment Effects with Implicit Generative Models
abstract
We consider the problem of partial identification, the estimation of bounds on the treatment effects from observational data. Although studied using discrete treatment variables or in specific causal graphs (e.g., instrumental variables), partial identification has been recently explored using tools from deep generative modeling. We propose a new method for partial identification of average treatment effects (ATEs) in general causal graphs using implicit generative models comprising continuous and discrete random variables. Since ATE with continuous treatment is generally non-regular, we leverage the partial derivatives of response functions to define a regular approximation of ATE, a quantity we call uniform average treatment derivative (UATD). We prove that our algorithm converges to tight bounds on ATE in linear structural causal models (SCMs). For nonlinear SCMs, we empirically show that using UATD leads to tighter and more stable bounds than methods that directly optimize the ATE.
Vahid Balazadeh Meresht, Vasilis Syrgkanis, Rahul G. Krishnan
NeurIPS1