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Summary
Summary
Foto: Gion Pfander
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Seminar for Statistics at ETH Zürich, working with Jonas Peters. I am also a Branco Weiss Fellow and an associated researcher at the ETH AI Center.
My research lies at the intersection of causal inference and machine learning, see Research Overview for more details on my prior work. At the moment, I am particularly interested in causal representation learning and applications in computational biology.
I obtained my PhD in a joint program between the University of Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, co-advised by Bernhard Schölkopf and Adrian Weller. During my PhD, I visited Columbia University and UC Berkeley and interned at Amazon.
Previously, I studied Mathematics (B.Sc., M.Sci.) at Imperial College London and Artificial Intelligence (M.Sc.) at UPC Barcelona and TU Delft.
Links
Links
News & Updates
News & Updates
10/2025 - Transferring Causal Effects using Proxies accepted at NeurIPS.
07/2025 - I have been awarded The Branco Weiss Fellowship.
04/2025 - New preprint: Representation Learning for Distributional Perturbation Extrapolation, presented at the LMRL Workshop.
02/2025 - New preprint: From Pixels to Components: Eigenvector Masking for Visual Representation Learning.
01/2025 - Interaction Asymmetry: A General Principle for Learning Composable Abstractions accepted at ICLR.
10/2024 - In this article (in German), I was interviewed about my work on causal ML.
07/2024 - Deep Backtracking Counterfactuals for Causally Compliant Explanations accepted at TMLR.
07/2024 - I gave a lecture on Causal Representation Learning at the OxML summer school on MLx Health & Bio.
05/2024 - Pleased to receive the 2024 Cambridge G-Research PhD Prize in Quantitative Research.
05/2024 - A Sparsity Principle for Partially Observable Causal Representation Learning accepted at ICML.
04/2024 - I gave an invited talk on causal representation learning at the CAUSE Junior Researcher Day at TU Munich.
03/2024 - I visited Portugal to give a Tutorial on "Causality for ML" at the INVICTA Spring School (Porto) and at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown (Lisbon)
03/2024 - I've started my postdoc with Jonas Peters at the Seminar for Statistics of ETH Zürich.
02/2024 - I successfully defended my PhD thesis titled "Identifiable Causal Representation Learning: Unsupervised, Multi-View, and Multi-Environment" (pass with no corrections)
01/2024 - Multi-View Causal Representation Learning with Partial Observability accepted at ICLR (spotlight).
12/2023 - I gave an invited talk at the Causal Representation Learning Workshop at NeurIPS, here are my [slides].
09/2023 - With fantastic co-authors, 3 papers accepted at NeurIPS:
PhD Thesis
PhD Thesis
Identifiable Causal Representation Learning:
Unsupervised, Multi-View, and Multi-Environment
Julius von Kügelgen
Highlighted Publications
Highlighted Publications
Representation Learning for Distributional Perturbation Extrapolation
JvK, Jakob Ketterer, Xinwei Shen, Nicolai Meinshausen, Jonas Peters
Workshop on Learning Meaningful Representations of Life @ ICLR 2025
[arXiv]
Interaction Asymmetry: A General Principle for Learning Composable Abstractions
Jack Brady, JvK, Sébastien Lachapelle, Simon Buchholz, Thomas Kipf, Wieland Brendel
ICLR 2025
[arXiv]
Multi-View Causal Representation Learning with Partial Observability.
Dingling Yao, Danru Xu, Sebastien Lachapelle, Sara Magliacane, Perouz Taslakian, Georg Martius, JvK, Francesco Locatello
ICLR 2024 (Spotlight; top 3%)
(also at: Workshop on Causal Representation Learning @ NeurIPS 2023, Oral)
[arXiv]
Self-Supervised Disentanglement by Leveraging Structure in Data Augmentations.
Cian Eastwood, JvK, Linus Ericsson, Diane Bouchacourt, Pascal Vincent, Bernhard Schölkopf, Mark Ibrahim
Workshop on Causal Representation Learning @ NeurIPS 2023
[arXiv]
Nonparametric Identifiability of Causal Representations from Unknown Interventions.
JvK, Michel Besserve, Wendong Liang, Luigi Gresele, Armin Kekić, Elias Bareinboim, David M. Blei, Bernhard Schölkopf
NeurIPS 2023
[arXiv]
Causal Component Analysis.
Wendong Liang, Armin Kekić, JvK, Simon Buchholz, Michel Besserve, Luigi Gresele, Bernhard Schölkopf
NeurIPS 2023
[arXiv]
Spuriosity Didn’t Kill the Classifier: Using Invariant Predictions to Harness Spurious Features.
Cian Eastwood, Shashank Singh, Andrei L. Nicolicioiu, Marin Vlastelica, JvK, Bernhard Schölkopf
NeurIPS 2023
(also at ICML 2023 Workshop Spurious Correlations, Invariance and Stability)
[arXiv]
Provably Learning Object-Centric Representations.
Jack Brady, Roland S. Zimmermann, Yash Sharma, Bernhard Schölkopf, JvK*, Wieland Brendel* (*shared last author)
ICML 2023 (Oral)
[arXiv] [project page]
Backtracking Counterfactuals.
JvK, Abdirisak Mohamed, Sander Beckers.
CLeaR 2023 (Best Paper Award)
[arXiv] [long presentation] [slides]
Active Bayesian Causal Inference.
Christian Toth, Lars Lorch, Christian Knoll, Andreas Krause, Franz Pernkopf, Robert Peharz*, JvK*. (*shared last author)
NeurIPS 2022
(also at: NeurIPS 2022 Workshops Causality for Real-world Impact & Neuro Causal and Symbolic AI)
Causal Inference Through the Structural Causal Marginal Problem.
Luigi Gresele*, JvK*, Jonas M. Kübler*, Elke Kirschbaum, Bernhard Schölkopf, Dominik Janzing. (*equal contribution)
ICML 2022
[arXiv]
On the Fairness of Causal Algorithmic Recourse.
JvK, Amir-Hossein Karimi, Umang Bhatt, Isabel Valera, Adrian Weller, Bernhard Schölkopf.
AAAI 2022 (Oral)
(also at: ICML 2021 Workshop Algorithmic Recourse; NeurIPS 2020 Workshop Algorithmic Fairness through the Lens of Causality and Interpretability (AFCI) )
Self-Supervised Learning with Data Augmentations Provably Isolates Content from Style.
JvK*, Yash Sharma*, Luigi Gresele*, Wieland Brendel, Bernhard Schölkopf, Michel Besserve, Francesco Locatello. (*equal contribution)
NeurIPS 2021
[arXiv] [code] [recording] [long presentation] [slides]
Independent Mechanism Analysis, A New Concept?
Luigi Gresele*, JvK*, Vincent Stimper, Bernhard Schölkopf, Michel Besserve. (*equal contribution)
NeurIPS 2021
Algorithmic Recourse Under Imperfect Causal Knowledge: A Probabilistic Approach
Amir-Hossein Karimi*, JvK*, Bernhard Schölkopf, Isabel Valera. (*equal contribution)
NeurIPS 2020 (Spotlight)
(also at: ICML 2020 Workshops
XXAI: Extending Explainable AI Beyond Deep Models and Classifiers (oral; 4/20 papers)
WHI: Workshop on Human Interpretability in Machine Learning (oral; 4/50 papers))
[paper] [short presentation] [long presentation (@UCL reading group)] [poster]
Other Publications & Preprints
Other Publications & Preprints
Transferring Causal Effects using Proxies.
Manuel Iglesias-Alonso, Felix Schur*, JvK*, Jonas Peters*. (*joint supervision)
NeurIPS 2025
[arXiv]
From Pixels to Components: Eigenvector Masking for Visual Representation Learning.
Alice Bizeul, Thomas Sutter, Alain Ryser, Bernhard Schölkopf, JvK, Julia E. Vogt.
[arXiv]
Deep Backtracking Counterfactuals for Causally Compliant Explanations.
Klaus-Rudolf Kladny, JvK, Bernhard Schölkopf, Michael Muehlebach.
TMLR
[arXiv] [OpenReview]
A Sparsity Principle for Partially Observable Causal Representation Learning.
Danru Xu, Dingling Yao, Sebastien Lachapelle, Perouz Taslakian, JvK, Francesco Locatello, Sara Magliacane.
ICML 2024
(Previously at: Workshop on Causal Representation Learning @ NeurIPS 2023)
[arXiv]
Independent Mechanism Analysis and the Manifold Hypothesis.
Shubhangi Ghosh, Luigi Gresele, JvK, Michel Besserve, Bernhard Schölkopf.
Workshop on Causal Representation Learning @ NeurIPS 2023
[arXiv]
Kernel-Based Independence Tests for Causal Structure Learning on Functional Data
Felix Laumann, JvK, Junhyung Park, Bernhard Schölkopf, Mauricio Barahona
Entropy, 2023 (Special Issue on Causality and Complex Systems)
[OpenAccess] [arXiv]
Causal Effect Estimation from Observational and Interventional Data Through Matrix Weighted Linear Estimators.
Klaus-Rudolf Kladny, JvK, Bernhard Schölkopf, Michael Muehlebach.
UAI 2023
[arXiv]
Evaluating Vaccine Allocation Strategies Using Simulation-Assisted Causal Modelling.
Armin Kekić, Jonas Dehning, Luigi Gresele, JvK, Viola Priesemann, Bernhard Schölkopf.
Patterns
(Previously at: NeurIPS 2022 Workshop A Causal View on Dynamical Systems)
Unsupervised Object Learning via Common Fate.
Matthias Tangemann, Steffen Schneider, JvK, Francesco Locatello, Peter Gehler, Thomas Brox, Matthias Kümmerer, Matthias Bethge, Bernhard Schölkopf.
CLeaR 2023
[arXiv]
DCI-ES: An Extended Disentanglement Framework with Connections to Identifiability.
Cian Eastwood*, Andrei Liviu Nicolicioiu*, JvK*, Armin Kekic, Frederik Träuble, Andrea Dittadi, Bernhard Schölkopf. (*equal contribution)
ICLR 2023
(Previously at: Workshop on Causal Representation Learning @ UAI 2022)
[arXiv]
Embrace the Gap: VAEs Perform Independent Mechanism Analysis.
Patrik Reizinger, Luigi Gresele, Jack Brady, JvK, Dominik Zietlow, Bernhard Schölkopf, Georg Martius, Wieland Brendel, Michel Besserve.
NeurIPS 2022
(Previously at: 5th Workshop on Tractable Probabilistic Modeling @ UAI 2022)
From Statistical to Causal Learning.
Bernhard Schölkopf*, JvK*. (*equal contribution)
Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians 2022
[arXiv]
Complex interlinkages, key objectives and nexuses amongst the Sustainable Development Goals and climate change: a network analysis
Felix Laumann, JvK, Thiago Hector Kanashiro Uehara, Mauricio Barahona
The Lancet Planetary Health, 2022
Towards Causal Algorithmic Recourse.
Amir-Hossein Karimi*, JvK*, Bernhard Schölkopf, Isabel Valera.
xxAI - Beyond Explainable AI---Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 13200, 2022.
You Mostly Walk Alone: Analyzing Feature Attribution in Trajectory Prediction.
Osama Makansi, JvK, Francesco Locatello, Peter Gehler, Dominik Janzing, Thomas Brox, Bernhard Schölkopf.
ICLR 2022
[arXiv]
Visual Representation Learning Does Not Generalize Strongly Within the Same Domain.
Lukas Schott, JvK, Frederik Träuble, Peter Gehler, Chris Russell, Matthias Bethge, Bernhard Schölkopf, Francesco Locatello, Wieland Brendel.
ICLR 2022
(Previously at: ICLR 2021 Workshop Generalization beyond the training distribution in brains and machines )
[paper] [poster] [code/benchmark]
Backward-Compatible Prediction Updates: A Probabilistic Approach.
Frederik Träuble, JvK, Matthäus Kleindessner, Francesco Locatello, Bernhard Schölkopf, Peter Gehler.
NeurIPS 2021
[arXiv] [recording]
Simpson's paradox in Covid-19 case fatality rates: a mediation analysis of age-related causal effects.
JvK*, Luigi Gresele*, Bernhard Schölkopf. (*equal contribution)
IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, 2021.
[paper] [data & code] [video1] [video2]
Algorithmic recourse in partially and fully confounded settings through bounding counterfactual effects.
JvK, Nikita Agarwal, Jakob Zeitler, Afsaneh Mastouri, Bernhard Schölkopf.
ICML 2021 Workshop Algorithmic Recourse
[arXiv]
Kernel Two-Sample and Independence Tests for Non-Stationary Random Processes.
Felix Laumann, JvK, Mauricio Barahona.
7th International Conference on Time Series and Forecasting (ITISE 2021)
Towards Causal Generative Scene Models via Competition of Experts.
JvK*, Ivan Ustyuzhaninov*, Peter Gehler, Matthias Bethge, Bernhard Schölkopf. (*equal contribution)
ICLR 2020 Workshop Causal Learning for Decision Making (CLDM)
[arXiv] [presentation (video)]
Semi-supervised learning, causality and the conditional cluster assumption.
JvK, Alexander Mey, Marco Loog, Bernhard Schölkopf.
UAI 2020
(also at: NeurIPS 2019 Workshop “Do the right thing”: machine learning and causal inference for improved decision making)
Optimal experimental design via Bayesian optimisation: active causal structure learning for Gaussian process networks.
JvK, Paul K Rubenstein, Bernhard Schölkopf, Adrian Weller.
NeurIPS 2019 Workshop “Do the right thing”: machine learning and causal inference for improved decision making
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