Scalable Contrastive Causal Discovery under Unknown Soft Interventions
Department of Systems Biology, Columbia University Irving Institute for Cancer Dynamics, Columbia University（系统生物学系，哥伦比亚大学伊万尼癌症动力学研究所，哥伦比亚大学）；Irving Institute for Cancer Dynamics, Columbia University（伊万尼癌症动力学研究所，哥伦比亚大学）；Department of Computer Science, Columbia University（计算机科学系，哥伦比亚大学）；Department of Biomedical Engineering, Columbia University（生物医学工程系，哥伦比亚大学）；Data Science Institute, Columbia University（数据科学研究所，哥伦比亚大学）
Observational causal discovery is only identifiable up to the Markov equivalence class. While interventions can reduce this ambiguity, in practice interventions are often soft with multiple unknown targets. In many realistic scenarios, only a single intervention regime is observed. We propose a scalable causal discovery model for paired observational and interventional settings with shared underlying causal structure and unknown soft interventions. The model aggregates subset-level PDAGs and applies contrastive cross-regime orientation rules to construct a globally consistent maximal PDAG under Meek closure, enabling generalization to both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings. Theoretically, we prove that our model is sound with respect to a restricted $Ψ$ equivalence class induced solely by the information available in the subset-restricted setting. We further show that the model asymptotically recovers the corresponding identifiable PDAG and can orient additional edges compared to non-contrastive subset-restricted methods. Experiments on synthetic data demonstrate improved causal structure recovery, generalization to unseen graphs with held-out causal mechanisms, and scalability to larger graphs, with ablations supporting the theoretical results.
The most widely discussed methods for estimating the Average Causal Effect/Average Treatment Effect are those for intervention in discrete binary variables whose value represents intervention/non-intervention groups. On the other hand, methods for intervening in continuous variables independent of data generating models have not been developed. In this study, we give a method for estimating the average causal effect for intervention in continuous variables that can be applied to data of any generating models as long as the causal effect is identifiable. The proposing method is independent of m…
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Data61/NICTA（Data61/国家信息与通信技术研究院）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）
We study the problem of using causal models to improve the rate at which good interventions can be learned online in a stochastic environment. Our formalism combines multi-arm bandits and causal inference to model a novel type of bandit feedback that is not exploited by existing approaches. We propose a new algorithm that exploits the causal feedback and prove a bound on its simple regret that is strictly better (in all quantities) than algorithms that do not use the additional causal information.
Relaxing Faithfulness with Intervention-Only Causal Discovery
Thayer School of Engineering Dartmouth College（达特茅斯学院塞耶工程学院）；Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard（麻省理工学院和哈佛大学布罗德研究所）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
In this paper, we discuss structure learning of causal networks from multiple data sets obtained by external intervention experiments where we do not know what variables are manipulated. For example, the conditions in these experiments are changed by changing temperature or using drugs, but we do not know what target variables are manipulated by the external interventions. From such data sets, the structure learning becomes more difficult. For this case, we first discuss the identifiability of causal structures. Next we present a graph-merging method for learning causal networks for the case t…
Interventions are central to causal learning and reasoning. Yet ultimately an intervention is an abstraction: an agent embedded in a physical environment (perhaps modeled as a Markov decision process) does not typically come equipped with the notion of an intervention -- its action space is typically ego-centric, without actions of the form `intervene on X'. Such a correspondence between ego-centric actions and interventions would be challenging to hard-code. It would instead be better if an agent learnt which sequence of actions allow it to make targeted manipulations of the environment, and …
Causal models bring many benefits to decision-making systems (or agents) by making them interpretable, sample-efficient, and robust to changes in the input distribution. However, spurious correlations can lead to wrong causal models and predictions. We consider the problem of inferring a causal model of a reinforcement learning environment and we propose a method to deal with spurious correlations. Specifically, our method designs a reward function that incentivizes an agent to do an intervention to find errors in the causal model. The data obtained from doing the intervention is used to impro…
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Army Research Lab（陆军研究实验室）
We propose a generative Causal Adversarial Network (CAN) for learning and sampling from conditional and interventional distributions. In contrast to the existing CausalGAN which requires the causal graph to be given, our proposed framework learns the causal relations from the data and generates samples accordingly. The proposed CAN comprises a two-fold process namely Label Generation Network (LGN) and Conditional Image Generation Network (CIGN). The LGN is a GAN-based architecture which learns and samples from the causal model over labels. The sampled labels are then fed to CIGN, a conditional…
The ability to answer causal questions is crucial in many domains, as causal inference allows one to understand the impact of interventions. In many applications, only a single intervention is possible at a given time. However, in some important areas, multiple interventions are concurrently applied. Disentangling the effects of single interventions from jointly applied interventions is a challenging task -- especially as simultaneously applied interventions can interact. This problem is made harder still by unobserved confounders, which influence both treatments and outcome. We address this c…
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Mila（米拉人工智能研究所）；Universite de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；GlaxoSmithKline（葛兰素史克）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；KTH Stockholm（瑞典皇家理工学院）；DeepMind（深度思维）
Discovering causal structures from data is a challenging inference problem of fundamental importance in all areas of science. The appealing properties of neural networks have recently led to a surge of interest in differentiable neural network-based methods for learning causal structures from data. So far, differentiable causal discovery has focused on static datasets of observational or fixed interventional origin. In this work, we introduce an active intervention targeting (AIT) method which enables a quick identification of the underlying causal structure of the data-generating process. Our…
ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；IBM Research Zürich（苏黎世IBM研究院）
Inferring causal structures from experimentation is a central task in many domains. For example, in biology, recent advances allow us to obtain single-cell expression data under multiple interventions such as drugs or gene knockouts. However, the targets of the interventions are often uncertain or unknown and the number of observations limited. As a result, standard causal discovery methods can no longer be reliably used. To fill this gap, we propose a Bayesian framework (BaCaDI) for discovering and reasoning about the causal structure that underlies data generated under various unknown experi…
University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Domain generalization aims to learn knowledge invariant across different distributions while semantically meaningful for downstream tasks from multiple source domains, to improve the model's generalization ability on unseen target domains. The fundamental objective is to understand the underlying "invariance" behind these observational distributions and such invariance has been shown to have a close connection to causality. While many existing approaches make use of the property that causal features are invariant across domains, we consider the causal invariance of the average causal effect of…
Generative Intervention Models for Causal Perturbation Modeling
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑技术大学）；Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich, Switzerland（苏黎世联邦理工学院计算机科学系）；Munich Center for Machine Learning, Germany（慕尼黑机器学习中心）
We consider recovering a causal graph in presence of latent variables, where we seek to minimize the cost of interventions used in the recovery process. We consider two intervention cost models: (1) a linear cost model where the cost of an intervention on a subset of variables has a linear form, and (2) an identity cost model where the cost of an intervention is the same, regardless of what variables it is on, i.e., the goal is just to minimize the number of interventions. Under the linear cost model, we give an algorithm to identify the ancestral relations of the underlying causal graph, achi…
We explore how observational and interventional causal discovery methods can be combined. A state-of-the-art observational causal discovery algorithm for time series capable of handling latent confounders and contemporaneous effects, called LPCMCI, is extended to profit from casual constraints found through randomized control trials. Numerical results show that, given perfect interventional constraints, the reconstructed structural causal models (SCMs) of the extended LPCMCI allow 84.6% of the time for the optimal prediction of the target variable. The implementation of interventional and obse…
Transforming a causal system from a given initial state to a desired target state is an important task permeating multiple fields including control theory, biology, and materials science. In causal models, such transformations can be achieved by performing a set of interventions. In this paper, we consider the problem of identifying a shift intervention that matches the desired mean of a system through active learning. We define the Markov equivalence class that is identifiable from shift interventions and propose two active learning strategies that are guaranteed to exactly match a desired me…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）
Causal discovery from observational and interventional data is challenging due to limited data and non-identifiability: factors that introduce uncertainty in estimating the underlying structural causal model (SCM). Selecting experiments (interventions) based on the uncertainty arising from both factors can expedite the identification of the SCM. Existing methods in experimental design for causal discovery from limited data either rely on linear assumptions for the SCM or select only the intervention target. This work incorporates recent advances in Bayesian causal discovery into the Bayesian o…
Causal inference methods are widely applied in various decision-making domains such as precision medicine, optimal policy and economics. Central to these applications is the treatment effect estimation of intervention strategies. Current estimation methods are mostly restricted to the deterministic treatment, which however, is unable to address the stochastic space treatment policies. Moreover, previous methods can only make binary yes-or-no decisions based on the treatment effect, lacking the capability of providing fine-grained effect estimation degree to explain the process of decision maki…
Incorporating causal knowledge and mechanisms is essential for refining causal models and improving downstream tasks such as designing new treatments. In this paper, we introduce a novel concept in causal discovery, termed interventional constraints, which differs fundamentally from interventional data. While interventional data require direct perturbations of variables, interventional constraints encode high-level causal knowledge in the form of inequality constraints on causal effects. For instance, in the Sachs dataset (Sachs et al.\ 2005), Akt has been shown to be activated by PIP3, meanin…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Sharif University of Technology（谢里夫理工大学）；École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）
It is known that from purely observational data, a causal DAG is identifiable only up to its Markov equivalence class, and for many ground truth DAGs, the direction of a large portion of the edges will be remained unidentified. The golden standard for learning the causal DAG beyond Markov equivalence is to perform a sequence of interventions in the system and use the data gathered from the interventional distributions. We consider a setup in which given a budget $k$, we design $k$ interventions non-adaptively. We cast the problem of finding the best intervention target set as an optimization p…
Deciphering interventional dynamical causality from non-intervention complex systems
Research Institute of Intelligent Complex Systems & CISOR, Fudan University（智能复杂系统研究所及CISOR，复旦大学）；International Research Center for Neurointelligence, The University of Tokyo Institutes for Advanced Study, The University of Tokyo（神经智能国际研究中心，东京大学先进研究所，东京大学）；School of Pharmacy, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine（上海中医药大学药学院）；Institute of AI and Robotics, College of Intelligent Robotics and Advanced Manufacturing, Fudan University（人工智能与机器人研究所，智能机器人与先进制造学院，复旦大学）；Frontiers Science Center for Deep Ocean Multispheres and Earth System, Key Laboratory of Marine Chemistry Theory and Technology, Ministry of Education, Ocean University of China（深海多球体与地球系统前沿科学中心，海洋化学理论与技术重点实验室，教育部，中国海洋大学）；School of Mathematical Sciences and School of AI, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（数学科学学院和人工智能学院，上海交通大学）；Key Laboratory of Systems Health Science of Zhejiang Province, Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences（浙江省系统健康科学重点实验室，杭州高级研究所，中国科学院大学，中国科学院）
TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；The University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）；Hessian Center for AI (hessian.AI)（黑森人工智能中心 (hessian.AI)）
While probabilistic models are an important tool for studying causality, doing so suffers from the intractability of inference. As a step towards tractable causal models, we consider the problem of learning interventional distributions using sum-product networks (SPNs) that are over-parameterized by gate functions, e.g., neural networks. Providing an arbitrarily intervened causal graph as input, effectively subsuming Pearl's do-operator, the gate function predicts the parameters of the SPN. The resulting interventional SPNs are motivated and illustrated by a structural causal model themed arou…
Unobserved confounding is one of the main challenges when estimating causal effects. We propose a causal reduction method that, given a causal model, replaces an arbitrary number of possibly high-dimensional latent confounders with a single latent confounder that takes values in the same space as the treatment variable, without changing the observational and interventional distributions the causal model entails. This allows us to estimate the causal effect in a principled way from combined data without relying on the common but often unrealistic assumption that all confounders have been observ…
IBM Research（IBM研究院）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
We consider the minimum cost intervention design problem: Given the essential graph of a causal graph and a cost to intervene on a variable, identify the set of interventions with minimum total cost that can learn any causal graph with the given essential graph. We first show that this problem is NP-hard. We then prove that we can achieve a constant factor approximation to this problem with a greedy algorithm. We then constrain the sparsity of each intervention. We develop an algorithm that returns an intervention design that is nearly optimal in terms of size for sparse graphs with sparse int…
University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；Amazon（亚马逊）
We introduce a new Collaborative Causal Discovery problem, through which we model a common scenario in which we have multiple independent entities each with their own causal graph, and the goal is to simultaneously learn all these causal graphs. We study this problem without the causal sufficiency assumption, using Maximal Ancestral Graphs (MAG) to model the causal graphs, and assuming that we have the ability to actively perform independent single vertex (or atomic) interventions on the entities. If the $M$ underlying (unknown) causal graphs of the entities satisfy a natural notion of cluster…
Trust Your $\nabla$: Gradient-based Intervention Targeting for Causal Discovery
Warsaw University（华沙大学）；IDEAS NCBR；Jagiellonian University（雅盖隆大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Helmholtz, TU Munich（慕尼黑工业大学亥姆霍兹中心）；Institute of Mathematics, Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院数学研究所）
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich（慕尼黑大学）；Siemens CT（西门子中央研究院）
Estimating individual treatment effects from data of randomized experiments is a critical task in causal inference. The Stable Unit Treatment Value Assumption (SUTVA) is usually made in causal inference. However, interference can introduce bias when the assigned treatment on one unit affects the potential outcomes of the neighboring units. This interference phenomenon is known as spillover effect in economics or peer effect in social science. Usually, in randomized experiments or observational studies with interconnected units, one can only observe treatment responses under interference. Hence…
LUMLIS (Lisbon ELLIS Unit)（里斯本ELLIS单元LUMLIS）；Instituto de Telecomunicações（电信研究所）；Unbabel（Unbabel公司）
Recent work has shown promising results in causal discovery by leveraging interventional data with gradient-based methods, even when the intervened variables are unknown. However, previous work assumes that the correspondence between samples and interventions is known, which is often unrealistic. We envision a scenario with an extensive dataset sampled from multiple intervention distributions and one observation distribution, but where we do not know which distribution originated each sample and how the intervention affected the system, \textit{i.e.}, interventions are entirely latent. We prop…
Cause-effect analysis is crucial to understand the underlying mechanism of a system. We propose to exploit model invariance through interventions on the predictors to infer causality in nonlinear multivariate systems of time series. We model nonlinear interactions in time series using DeepAR and then expose the model to different environments using Knockoffs-based interventions to test model invariance. Knockoff samples are pairwise exchangeable, in-distribution and statistically null variables generated without knowing the response. We test model invariance where we show that the distribution…
Describing the causal relations governing a system is a fundamental task in many scientific fields, ideally addressed by experimental studies. However, obtaining data under intervention scenarios may not always be feasible, while discovering causal relations from purely observational data is notoriously challenging. In certain settings, such as genomics, we may have data from heterogeneous study conditions, with soft (partial) interventions only pertaining to a subset of the study variables, whose effects and targets are possibly unknown. Combining data from experimental and observational stud…
CausalGaze: Unveiling Hallucinations via Counterfactual Graph Intervention in Large Language Models
College of Electronic Engineering, National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学电子工程学院）；Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Security Situation Awareness and Evaluation（安徽省网络空间安全态势感知与评估重点实验室）；Institute of Computer Application, China Academy of Engineering Physics（中国工程物理研究院计算机应用研究所）
Identifiability Guarantees for Causal Disentanglement from Soft Interventions
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard（麻省理工学院与哈佛大学布罗德研究所）；Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, MIT（麻省理工学院信息与决策系统实验室）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（MIT-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
University of Massachusetts（马萨诸塞大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Causal inference can be formalized as Bayesian inference that combines a prior distribution over causal models and likelihoods that account for both observations and interventions. We show that it is possible to implement this approach using a sufficiently expressive probabilistic programming language. Priors are represented using probabilistic programs that generate source code in a domain specific language. Interventions are represented using probabilistic programs that edit this source code to modify the original generative process. This approach makes it straightforward to incorporate data…
