adiba ejaz

I'm a fourth-year PhD student in the causal AI lab at Columbia University, where I'm advised by the wonderful Elias Bareinboim. I study when and how AI can generalize to unseen combinations of interacting objects (think Steve Wozniak's coffee test ☕), using ideas from causal and relational machine learning. I've also worked on algorithms for learning causal models from high-dimensional data.

Prior to graduate school, I completed a bachelor's in math and computer science (also at Columbia), during which I was fortunate to work with Christos Papadimitriou on 'neural' language modeling without neural networks.

e-mail: adiba dot ejaz at cs dot columbia dot edu

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Papers

A Characterization of Latent Variable Causal Models Consistent with Observational Data with Hongshuo Yang, Yushu Pan, and Elias Bareinboim.
[technical report] NeurIPS 2026.

Neural Causal Models Under Markov Equivalence with Hongshuo Yang, Yushu Pan, and Elias Bareinboim.
[technical report] NeurIPS 2026.

Relational Structural Causal Models with Elias Bareinboim.
[arXiv] ICML 2026.

Characterizing Backtracking in CoT through Internal Probes and Surface-Level Features with Aditya Gupta, Arthur Pogosian, and Peter Hase.
[proceedings] ICLR 2026 Workshop on LLM Reasoning.

Less Greedy Equivalence Search with Elias Bareinboim.
[arXiv] NeurIPS 2025.

Testing Causal Models with Hidden Variables in Polynomial Delay via Conditional Independencies with Hyunchai Jeong, Jin Tian, and Elias Bareinboim.
[arXiv, poster] Oral at AAAI 2025.

Center-Embedding and Constituency in the Brain and a New Characterization of Context-Free Languages with Dan Mitropolsky, Mirah Shi, Christos Papadimitriou, and Mihalis Yannakakis.
[arXiv, proceedings] NALOMA 2022.

Teaching

I love teaching, and have TA'd for

Causal Inference I (Fall 2024 with Elias Bareinboim)
Computational Complexity (Fall 2022 with Xi Chen, Spring 2023 with Rocco Servedio)
Modern Algebra I (Fall 2020 with Robert Friedman, Spring 2022 with Jorge Pineiro)
Honors Mathematics B (Spring 2021 with Evan Warner)

I've also organised seminars in algorithmic game theory (Summer 2021) and the formal semantics of programming languages (Fall 2022) with the undergraduate TCS seminar at Columbia; and taught philosophy to high-schoolers in New York through Corrupt the Youth.

hello worldling! i'm

adiba ejaz

Papers

Teaching

Et cetera