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
2025
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.
Using Action-Policy Testing in RL to Reduce the Number of Bugs Journal Article
In: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Combinatorial Search, 2025.
COPA: Comparing the Incomparable to Explore the Pareto Front Journal Article
In: CoRR, vol. abs/2503.14321, 2025.
DeCaFlow: A Deconfounding Causal Generative Model Journal Article
In: CoRR, vol. abs/2503.15114, 2025.
A Causal Framework to Measure and Mitigate Non-binary Treatment Discrimination Journal Article
In: CoRR, vol. abs/2503.22454, 2025.
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.
Hyper-Transforming Latent Diffusion Models Journal Article
In: CoRR, vol. abs/2504.16580, 2025.
Temporal Variational Implicit Neural Representations Journal Article
In: CoRR, vol. abs/2506.01544, 2025.
Towards Reasonable Concept Bottleneck Models Journal Article
In: CoRR, vol. abs/2506.05014, 2025.
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.
Per-Domain Generalizing Policies: On Validation Instances and Scaling Behavior Journal Article
In: CoRR, vol. abs/2505.00439, 2025.
Bridging Fairness and Explainability: Can Input-Based Explanations Promote Fairness in Hate Speech Detection? Journal Article
In: CoRR, vol. abs/2509.22291, 2025.
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.
Personalizing explanations in AI-based decisions: The effects of personalization and (Mis)aligning with individual preferences Journal Article
In: Computers in Human Behavior, 2025.
2024
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.
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.
Exploring the Boundaries of Ambient Awareness in Twitter Journal Article
In: CoRR, vol. abs/2403.17776, 2024.
Improving the interpretability of GNN predictions through conformal-based graph sparsification Journal Article
In: CoRR, vol. abs/2404.12356, 2024.
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.
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.
Probabilistic neural transfer function estimation with Bayesian system identification Journal Article
In: PLoS Comput. Biol., vol. 20, no. 7, pp. 1012354, 2024.
2023
Causal normalizing flows: from theory to practice Journal Article
In: CoRR, vol. abs/2306.05415, 2023.
Variational Mixture of HyperGenerators for Learning Distributions Over Functions Journal Article
In: CoRR, vol. abs/2302.06223, 2023.
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.
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.
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.
2022
Mitigating Modality Collapse in Multimodal VAEs via Impartial Optimization Journal Article
In: CoRR, vol. abs/2206.04496, 2022.
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.
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.
PMLR, vol. 151, 2022.
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.
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.
2021
Boosting heterogeneous VAEs via multi-objective optimization Workshop
2021.
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.
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.
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.
Springer, vol. 12457, 2021, ISBN: 978-3-030-67657-5.
Springer, vol. 12458, 2021, ISBN: 978-3-030-67660-5.
Springer, vol. 12459, 2021, ISBN: 978-3-030-67663-6.
2020
Lipschitz standardization for robust multivariate learning Journal Article
In: CoRR, vol. abs/2002.11369, 2020.
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.
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.
A survey of algorithmic recourse: definitions, formulations, solutions, and prospects Journal Article
In: CoRR, vol. abs/2010.04050, 2020.
General Latent Feature Models for Heterogeneous Datasets Journal Article
In: J. Mach. Learn. Res., vol. 21, pp. 100:1–100:49, 2020.
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.
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.
2019
Fairness Constraints: A Flexible Approach for Fair Classification Journal Article
In: J. Mach. Learn. Res., vol. 20, pp. 75:1–75:42, 2019.
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.
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.
Improving Consequential Decision Making under Imperfect Predictions Journal Article
In: CoRR, vol. abs/1902.02979, 2019.
