Lucius EJ Bynum

I am a Data Science Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow at the NYU Center for Data Science.

I do research at the intersection of causal inference (CI) and artificial intelligence (AI). My work includes developing tools to reimagine causal effect estimation as meta-learning as well as combine CI and AI tools (like language models and structural causal models) to fundamentally improve average as well as heterogeneous treatment effect estimation. I have also worked on improving inequality-aware decision making, on leveraging counterfactual reasoning to improve ML model explainability and reduce pre-existing disparities, and on reimagining how we use causal modeling formalisms to approach AI problems involving demographic data.

I completed my PhD at NYU CDS, generously supported by the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship, and co-advised by Julia Stoyanovich as part of the Center for Responsible AI and by Joshua Loftus at the London School of Economics. In my dissertation research, I have also had the pleasure of working with Kyunghyun Cho and Jennifer Hill.

I am also passionate about teaching via public outreach and making educational material in these areas.

news

Mar 07, 2025 New preprint release: Black Box Causal Inference: Effect Estimation via Meta Prediction.
Nov 13, 2024 New preprint release: Language Models as Causal Effect Generators.
Oct 08, 2024 Paper accepted at NeurIPS 2024! Causal Dependence Plots.
Aug 03, 2024 Paper accepted for oral presentation at IJCAI 2024! A New Paradigm for Counterfactual Reasoning in Fairness and Recourse.
Apr 11, 2024 Nominated for the 2024 Future Leaders Summit on Responsible Data Science and AI! Thank you to the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) and to all attendees for a great symposium!

selected publications

1

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    Black Box Causal Inference: Effect Estimation via Meta Prediction
    Lucius EJ Bynum ,  Aahlad Manas Puli ,  Diego Herrero-Quevedo , and 4 more authors
    arXiv Preprint arXiv:2503.05985, 2025

2

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    Causal Dependence Plots
    Joshua R Loftus ,  Lucius EJ Bynum ,  and  Sakina Hansen
    In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems , 2024

3

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    Language Models as Causal Effect Generators
    Lucius EJ Bynum ,  and  Kyunghyun Cho
    arXiv Preprint arXiv:2411.08019, 2024

4

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    Counterfactuals for the Future
    Lucius EJ Bynum ,  Joshua R Loftus ,  and  Julia Stoyanovich
    Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Jun 2023

5

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    A New Paradigm for Counterfactual Reasoning in Fairness and Recourse
    Lucius E.J. Bynum ,  Joshua R. Loftus ,  and  Julia Stoyanovich
    In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-24 , Aug 2024
    Main Track