People

Isabel Valera

​Saarland Informatics Campus
Building E1 1, R. 225

For administrative services, contact ml-office@lists.saarland-informatics-campus.de
To apply for PhD/PostDoc/HiWi/Thesis, see the information on the “Positions” page for the correct e-mail to use.
Otherwise, contact ivalera@cs.uni-saarland.de.

About me

I am a full Professor on Machine Learning at the Department of Computer Science of Saarland University (Saarbrücken, Germany), and Adjunct Faculty at MPI for Software Systems in Saarbrücken (Saarbrücken, Germany).

I am a fellow of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), where I am part of the Robust Machine Learning Program and of the Saarbrücken Artificial Intelligence & Machine learning (Sam) Unit.

Prior to this, I was an independent group leader at the MPI for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen (Germany) until the end of the year. I have held a German Humboldt Post-Doctoral Fellowship, and a “Minerva fast track” fellowship from the Max Planck Society. I obtained my PhD in 2014 and MSc degree in 2012 from the University Carlos III in Madrid (Spain), and worked as postdoctoral researcher at the MPI for Software Systems (Germany) and at the University of Cambridge (UK).

Publications

80 entries « 1 of 2 »

2025

Eisenhut, Jan; Fivser, Daniel; Valera, Isabel; Hoffmann, J¨org

On Picking Good Policies: Leveraging Action-Policy Testing in Policy Training Journal Article

In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, 2025.

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Eniser, Hasan Ferit; Lin, Songtuan; Müller, Nicola; Isychev, Anastasia; Wüstholz, Valentin; Valera, Isabel; Hoffmann, J¨org; Christakis, Maria

Using Action-Policy Testing in RL to Reduce the Number of Bugs Journal Article

In: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Combinatorial Search, 2025.

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Javaloy, Adrián; Vergari, Antonio; Valera, Isabel

COPA: Comparing the Incomparable to Explore the Pareto Front Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/2503.14321, 2025.

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Almodóvar, Alejandro; Javaloy, Adrián; Parras, Juan; Zazo, Santiago; Valera, Isabel

DeCaFlow: A Deconfounding Causal Generative Model Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/2503.15114, 2025.

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Majumdar, Ayan; Kanubala, Deborah Dormah; Gupta, Kavya; Valera, Isabel

A Causal Framework to Measure and Mitigate Non-binary Treatment Discrimination Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/2503.22454, 2025.

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Cinquini, Martina; Beretta, Isacco; Ruggieri, Salvatore; Valera, Isabel

A Practical Approach to Causal Inference over Time Proceedings Article

In: Walsh, Toby; Shah, Julie; Kolter, Zico (Ed.): AAAI-25, Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, February 25 - March 4, 2025, Philadelphia, PA, USA, pp. 14832–14839, AAAI Press, 2025.

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Peis, Ignacio; Koyuncu, Batuhan; Valera, Isabel; Frellsen, Jes

Hyper-Transforming Latent Diffusion Models Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/2504.16580, 2025.

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Koyuncu, Batuhan; DeVries, Rachael; Winther, Ole; Valera, Isabel

Temporal Variational Implicit Neural Representations Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/2506.01544, 2025.

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Kalampalikis, Nektarios; Gupta, Kavya; Vitanov, Georgi; Valera, Isabel

Towards Reasonable Concept Bottleneck Models Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/2506.05014, 2025.

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Azime, Israel Abebe; Kanubala, Deborah Dormah; Afonja, Tejumade; Fritz, Mario; Valera, Isabel; Klakow, Dietrich; Slusallek, Philipp

Accept or Deny? Evaluating LLM Fairness and Performance in Loan Approval across Table-to-Text Serialization Approaches Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/2508.21512, 2025.

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Gros, Timo P.; Müller, Nicola J.; Fiser, Daniel; Valera, Isabel; Wolf, Verena; Hoffmann, Jörg

Per-Domain Generalizing Policies: On Validation Instances and Scaling Behavior Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/2505.00439, 2025.

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Wang, Yifan; Jobanputra, Mayank; Lee, Ji-Ung; Oh, Soyoung; Valera, Isabel; Demberg, Vera

Bridging Fairness and Explainability: Can Input-Based Explanations Promote Fairness in Hate Speech Detection? Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/2509.22291, 2025.

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Kanubala, Deborah Dormah; Valera, Isabel

On the Misalignment Between Legal Notions and Statistical Metrics of Intersectional Fairness Journal Article

In: Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 2025.

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Uth, Richard; Niemitz, Nelli; Valera, Isabel; Langer, Markus

Personalizing explanations in AI-based decisions: The effects of personalization and (Mis)aligning with individual preferences Journal Article

In: Computers in Human Behavior, 2025.

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2024

Beretta, Isacco; Cinquini, Martina; Valera, Isabel

Enhancing Fairness Through Time-aware Recourse: a Pathway to Realistic Algorithmic Recommendations Proceedings Article

In: Cerrato, Mattia; Coronel, Alesia Vallenas; Ahrweiler, Petra; Loi, Michele; Pechenizkiy, Mykola; Tamò-Larrieux, Aurelia (Ed.): Proceedings of the 3rd European Workshop on Algorithmic Fairness, Mainz, Germany, July 1st to 3rd, 2024, CEUR-WS.org, 2024.

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Kanubala, Deborah Dormah; Valera, Isabel; Gupta, Kavya

Fairness Beyond Binary Decisions: a Case Study on German Credit Proceedings Article

In: Cerrato, Mattia; Coronel, Alesia Vallenas; Ahrweiler, Petra; Loi, Michele; Pechenizkiy, Mykola; Tamò-Larrieux, Aurelia (Ed.): Proceedings of the 3rd European Workshop on Algorithmic Fairness, Mainz, Germany, July 1st to 3rd, 2024, CEUR-WS.org, 2024.

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Sánchez-Martin, Pablo; Utz, Sonja; Valera, Isabel

Exploring the Boundaries of Ambient Awareness in Twitter Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/2403.17776, 2024.

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Sánchez-Martin, Pablo; Khan, Kinaan Aamir; Valera, Isabel

Improving the interpretability of GNN predictions through conformal-based graph sparsification Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/2404.12356, 2024.

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Rateike, Miriam; Valera, Isabel; Forré, Patrick

Designing Long-term Group Fair Policies in Dynamical Systems Proceedings Article

In: The 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, FAccT 2024, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 3-6, 2024, pp. 20–50, ACM, 2024.

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Majumdar, Ayan; Valera, Isabel

CARMA: A practical framework to generate recommendations for causal algorithmic recourse at scale Proceedings Article

In: The 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, FAccT 2024, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 3-6, 2024, pp. 1745–1762, ACM, 2024.

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Wu, Nan; Valera, Isabel; Sinz, Fabian H.; Ecker, Alexander S.; Euler, Thomas; Qiu, Yongrong

Probabilistic neural transfer function estimation with Bayesian system identification Journal Article

In: PLoS Comput. Biol., vol. 20, no. 7, pp. 1012354, 2024.

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2023

Javaloy, Adrián; Sánchez-Mart'ın, Pablo; Valera, Isabel

Causal normalizing flows: from theory to practice Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/2306.05415, 2023.

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Koyuncu, Batuhan; Sánchez-Mart'ın, Pablo; Peis, Ignacio; Olmos, Pablo M.; Valera, Isabel

Variational Mixture of HyperGenerators for Learning Distributions Over Functions Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/2302.06223, 2023.

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Javaloy, Adrián; Sánchez-Mart'ın, Pablo; Levi, Amit; Valera, Isabel

Learnable Graph Convolutional Attention Networks Proceedings Article

In: The Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2023, Kigali, Rwanda, May 1-5, 2023, OpenReview.net, 2023.

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Karimi, Amir-Hossein; Barthe, Gilles; Schölkopf, Bernhard; Valera, Isabel

A Survey of Algorithmic Recourse: Contrastive Explanations and Consequential Recommendations Journal Article

In: ACM Comput. Surv., vol. 55, no. 5, pp. 95:1–95:29, 2023.

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Langer, Markus; Valera, Isabel

Leveraging Actionable Explanations to Improve People's Reactions to AI-Based Decisions Proceedings Article

In: Steffen, Bernhard (Ed.): Bridging the Gap Between AI and Reality - First International Conference, AISoLA 2023, Crete, Greece, October 23-28, 2023, Selected Papers, pp. 293–306, Springer, 2023.

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2022

Javaloy, Adrián; Meghdadi, Maryam; Valera, Isabel

Mitigating Modality Collapse in Multimodal VAEs via Impartial Optimization Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/2206.04496, 2022.

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Kügelgen, Julius; Karimi, Amir-Hossein; Bhatt, Umang; Valera, Isabel; Weller, Adrian; Schölkopf, Bernhard

On the Fairness of Causal Algorithmic Recourse Proceedings Article

In: Thirty-Sixth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2022, Thirty-Fourth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, IAAI 2022, The Twelveth Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence, EAAI 2022 Virtual Event, February 22 - March 1, 2022, pp. 9584–9594, AAAI Press, 2022.

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Javaloy, Adrián; Valera, Isabel

RotoGrad: Gradient Homogenization in Multitask Learning Proceedings Article

In: The Tenth International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2022, Virtual Event, April 25-29, 2022, OpenReview.net, 2022.

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Camps-Valls, Gustau; Ruiz, Francisco J. R.; Valera, Isabel (Ed.)

International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, AISTATS 2022, 28-30 March 2022, Virtual Event Proceedings

PMLR, vol. 151, 2022.

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Sánchez-Mart'ın, Pablo; Rateike, Miriam; Valera, Isabel

VACA: Designing Variational Graph Autoencoders for Causal Queries Proceedings Article

In: Thirty-Sixth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2022, Thirty-Fourth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, IAAI 2022, The Twelveth Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence, EAAI 2022 Virtual Event, February 22 - March 1, 2022, pp. 8159–8168, AAAI Press, 2022.

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Rateike, Miriam; Majumdar, Ayan; Mineeva, Olga; Gummadi, Krishna P.; Valera, Isabel

Don't Throw it Away! The Utility of Unlabeled Data in Fair Decision Making Proceedings Article

In: FAccT '22: 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, Seoul, Republic of Korea, June 21 - 24, 2022, pp. 1421–1433, ACM, 2022.

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2021

Javaloy, Adrián; Meghdadi, Maryam; Valera, Isabel

Boosting heterogeneous VAEs via multi-objective optimization Workshop

2021.

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Mohammadi, Kiarash; Karimi, Amir-Hossein; Barthe, Gilles; Valera, Isabel

Scaling Guarantees for Nearest Counterfactual Explanations Proceedings Article

In: Fourcade, Marion; Kuipers, Benjamin; Lazar, Seth; Mulligan, Deirdre K. (Ed.): AIES '21: AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, Virtual Event, USA, May 19-21, 2021, pp. 177–187, ACM, 2021.

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Karimi, Amir-Hossein; Schölkopf, Bernhard; Valera, Isabel

Algorithmic Recourse: from Counterfactual Explanations to Interventions Proceedings Article

In: Elish, Madeleine Clare; Isaac, William; Zemel, Richard S. (Ed.): FAccT '21: 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, Virtual Event / Toronto, Canada, March 3-10, 2021, pp. 353–362, ACM, 2021.

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Schöffer, Jakob; Kuehl, Niklas; Valera, Isabel

A Ranking Approach to Fair Classification Proceedings Article

In: COMPASS '21: ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies, Virtual Event, Australia, 28 June 2021 - 2 July 2021, pp. 115–125, ACM, 2021.

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Hutter, Frank; Kersting, Kristian; Lijffijt, Jefrey; Valera, Isabel (Ed.)

Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases - European Conference, ECML PKDD 2020, Ghent, Belgium, September 14-18, 2020, Proceedings, Part I Proceedings

Springer, vol. 12457, 2021, ISBN: 978-3-030-67657-5.

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Hutter, Frank; Kersting, Kristian; Lijffijt, Jefrey; Valera, Isabel (Ed.)

Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases - European Conference, ECML PKDD 2020, Ghent, Belgium, September 14-18, 2020, Proceedings, Part II Proceedings

Springer, vol. 12458, 2021, ISBN: 978-3-030-67660-5.

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Hutter, Frank; Kersting, Kristian; Lijffijt, Jefrey; Valera, Isabel (Ed.)

Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases - European Conference, ECML PKDD 2020, Ghent, Belgium, September 14-18, 2020, Proceedings, Part III Proceedings

Springer, vol. 12459, 2021, ISBN: 978-3-030-67663-6.

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2020

Javaloy, Adrián; Valera, Isabel

Lipschitz standardization for robust multivariate learning Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/2002.11369, 2020.

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Karimi, Amir-Hossein; Barthe, Gilles; Balle, Borja; Valera, Isabel

Model-Agnostic Counterfactual Explanations for Consequential Decisions Proceedings Article

In: Chiappa, Silvia; Calandra, Roberto (Ed.): The 23rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, AISTATS 2020, 26-28 August 2020, Online [Palermo, Sicily, Italy], pp. 895–905, PMLR, 2020.

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Karimi, Amir-Hossein; Kügelgen, Bodo Julius; Schölkopf, Bernhard; Valera, Isabel

Algorithmic recourse under imperfect causal knowledge: a probabilistic approach Proceedings Article

In: Larochelle, Hugo; Ranzato, Marc'Aurelio; Hadsell, Raia; Balcan, Maria-Florina; Lin, Hsuan-Tien (Ed.): Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 33: Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2020, NeurIPS 2020, December 6-12, 2020, virtual, 2020.

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Karimi, Amir-Hossein; Barthe, Gilles; Schölkopf, Bernhard; Valera, Isabel

A survey of algorithmic recourse: definitions, formulations, solutions, and prospects Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/2010.04050, 2020.

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Valera, Isabel; Pradier, Melanie F.; Lomeli, Maria; Ghahramani, Zoubin

General Latent Feature Models for Heterogeneous Datasets Journal Article

In: J. Mach. Learn. Res., vol. 21, pp. 100:1–100:49, 2020.

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Kilbertus, Niki; Rodriguez, Manuel Gomez; Schölkopf, Bernhard; Muandet, Krikamol; Valera, Isabel

Fair Decisions Despite Imperfect Predictions Proceedings Article

In: Chiappa, Silvia; Calandra, Roberto (Ed.): The 23rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, AISTATS 2020, 26-28 August 2020, Online [Palermo, Sicily, Italy], pp. 277–287, PMLR, 2020.

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Karimi, Amir-Hossein; Kügelgen, Julius; Schölkopf, Bernhard; Valera, Isabel

Towards Causal Algorithmic Recourse Proceedings Article

In: Holzinger, Andreas; Goebel, Randy; Fong, Ruth; Moon, Taesup; Müller, Klaus-Robert; Samek, Wojciech (Ed.): xxAI - Beyond Explainable AI - International Workshop, Held in Conjunction with ICML 2020, July 18, 2020, Vienna, Austria, Revised and Extended Papers, pp. 139–166, Springer, 2020.

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2019

Zafar, Muhammad Bilal; Valera, Isabel; Gomez-Rodriguez, Manuel; Gummadi, Krishna P.

Fairness Constraints: A Flexible Approach for Fair Classification Journal Article

In: J. Mach. Learn. Res., vol. 20, pp. 75:1–75:42, 2019.

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Adel, Tameem; Valera, Isabel; Ghahramani, Zoubin; Weller, Adrian

One-Network Adversarial Fairness Proceedings Article

In: The Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2019, The Thirty-First Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, IAAI 2019, The Ninth AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence, EAAI 2019, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, January 27 - February 1, 2019, pp. 2412–2420, AAAI Press, 2019.

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Vergari, Antonio; Molina, Alejandro; Peharz, Robert; Ghahramani, Zoubin; Kersting, Kristian; Valera, Isabel

Automatic Bayesian Density Analysis Proceedings Article

In: The Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2019, The Thirty-First Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, IAAI 2019, The Ninth AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence, EAAI 2019, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, January 27 - February 1, 2019, pp. 5207–5215, AAAI Press, 2019.

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Kilbertus, Niki; Gomez-Rodriguez, Manuel; Schölkopf, Bernhard; Muandet, Krikamol; Valera, Isabel

Improving Consequential Decision Making under Imperfect Predictions Journal Article

In: CoRR, vol. abs/1902.02979, 2019.

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80 entries « 1 of 2 »