Moritz Willig

Conference | Journal | Workshop | Preprint | *: indicates shared first-authorship.

Preprints

CausalSteward: An Agentic Divide-Conquer-Combine Copilot for Causal Discovery
Nicholas Tagliapietra, Gian Lorenzo Marchioni, Moritz Willig, Juergen Luettin, Lavdim Halilaj, Kristian Kersting.
ArXiv, 2026. Link: arXiv

Fodor and Pylyshyn’s Legacy – Still No Human-like Systematic Compositionality in Neural Networks
Tim Woydt, Moritz Willig, Antonia Wüst, Lukas Helff, Wolfgang Stammer, Constantin A. Rothkopf and Kristian Kersting.
ArXiv 2025, Link: arXiv.

CausalMan: A Physics-Based Simulator for Large-Scale Causality
Nicholas Tagliapietra, Juergen Luettin, Lavdim Halilaj, Moritz Willig, Tim Pychynski, Kristian Kersting.
ArXiv 2025, Link: arXiv.

2026

Tracing Actual Causes with Counterfactual Witness Maps
Tim Woydt, Matej Zečević, Kristian Kersting, Moritz Willig.
Fortieth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2026), 2026. Link: [to appear]

xWhyL: Causal Interactive Learning
Nicholas Tagliapietra, Florian Peter Busch, Moritz Willig, Matej Zečević, Lavdim Halilaj, Juergen Luettin and Kristian Kersting.
Fortieth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2026), 2026. Link: [camera ready to appear]; arXiv

Tagged for Direction: Pinning Down Causal Edge Directions with Precision
Florian Peter Busch*, Moritz Willig*, Florian Guldan, Kristian Kersting and Devendra Singh Dhami.
Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2026. Link: OpenReview
⭐ Reproducibility Certification

Causal Substrates: A Set-Theoretic Foundation of Causal Inference
Turan Orujlu, Moritz Willig, Matej Zečević.
UAI 2026 Workshop on Causality for Decision Making. Link: OpenReview

Probabilistic Circuit Networks
Florian Peter Busch, Moritz Willig, Kristian Kersting, Devendra Singh Dhami.
ProbML 2026 Workshop Track. Link: OpenReview

Membership Circuits: Tractable Membership Testing via Probabilistic Circuits
Bennet Wittelsbach, Arseny Skryagin, Jonas Seng, Moritz Willig, Kristian Kersting.
ICML 2026 Workshop on Hypothesis Testing. Link: OpenReview

2025

When Causal Dynamics Matter: Adapting Causal Strategies through Meta-Aware Interventions
Moritz Willig, Tim Nelson Woydt, Devendra Singh Dhami and Kristian Kersting.
Thirty-ninth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025). Link: OpenReview

Structural Causal Circuits: Probabilistic Circuits Climbing All Rungs of Pearl's Ladder of Causation
Florian Peter Busch, Moritz Willig, Matej Zečević, Kristian Kersting and Devendra Singh Dhami.
Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2025. Link: OpenReview

Counterfactual Sum-Product Networks
Florian Peter Busch, Moritz Willig, Matej Zečević, Kristian Kersting and Devendra Singh Dhami.
UAI 2025 Workshop on Tractable Probabilistic Models, 2025. Link: OpenReview

Systems with Switching Causal Relations: A Meta-Causal Perspective
Moritz Willig, Tim Nelson Tobiasch, Florian Peter Busch, Jonas Seng, Devendra Singh Dhami and Kristian Kersting.
The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025), 2025. Link: OpenReview
⭐ Spotlight

2024

Systems with Switching Causal Relations: A Meta-Causal Perspective
Moritz Willig, Tim Nelson Tobiasch, Florian Peter Busch, Jonas Seng, Devendra Singh Dhami and Kristian Kersting.
NeurIPS2024 Causal Representation Learning Workshop, 2024. Link: OpenReview.

psiNet: Efficient Causal Modeling at Scale
Florian Peter Busch, Moritz Willig, Jonas Seng, Kristian Kersting and Devendra Singh Dhami.
International Conference on Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGM), pages 452–469. PMLR, 2024. Link: PMLR.

chiSPN: Characteristic Interventional Sum-Product Networks for Causal Inference in Hybrid Domains
Harsh Poonia, Moritz Willig, Zhongjie Yu, Matej Zečević, Kristian Kersting and Devendra Singh Dhami.
The 40th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2024), 2024. Link: OpenReview.

“Do Not Disturb My Circles!” Identifying the Type of Counterfactual at Hand
Moritz Willig, Matej Zečević, and Kristian Kersting.
Conference on Advances in Robust Argumentation Machines (RATIO), pages 266–275. Springer, 2024. Link: Springer.

Chain Versus Common Cause: Biased Causal Strength Judgments in Humans and Large Language Models
Anita Keshmirian, Moritz Willig, Babak Hemmatian, Kristian Kersting, Ulrike Hahn and Tobias Gerstenberg.
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2024), volume 46, 2024. Link: eScholarship.

2023

Do Not Marginalize Mechanisms, Rather Consolidate!
Moritz Willig, Matej Zečević, Devendra Singh Dhami and Kristian Kersting.
Thirty-seventh Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023), 2023. Link: OpenReview.

Causal Parrots: Large language Models May Talk Causality But Are not Causal
Matej Zečević*, Moritz Willig*, Devendra Singh Dhami and Kristian Kersting.
Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2023. Link: OpenReview.

Identifying Challenges for Generalizing to the Pearl Causal Hierarchy on Images
Matej Zečević, Moritz Willig, Devendra Singh Dhami and Kristian Kersting.
ICLR 2023 Workshop on Domain Generalization, 2023. Link: OpenReview.

2022

Can Foundation Models Talk Causality?
Moritz Willig*, Matej Zečević*, Devendra Singh Dhami and Kristian Kersting.
UAI 2022 Workshop on Causal Representation Learning, 2022. Link: ArXiv.

2020

Learning to Play the Chess Variant Crazyhouse Above World Champion Level with Deep Neural Networks and Human Data
Johannes Czech, Moritz Willig, Alena Beyer, Kristian Kersting and Johannes Fürnkranz.
Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 3:24, 2020. Link: FrontiersIn.