arXiv Machine Learning

Structural Causal Bottleneck Models

arXiv AI
Jul 14

CDFM: Towards a General-Purpose Causal Discovery Foundation Model

arXiv:2607. 11508v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal discovery, the process of recovering underlying causal structures from observational data, is a fundamental pursuit across scientific disciplines.

By Jie Qiao, Ruichu Cai, Zijian Li, Weilin Chen, Pengfei Hua, Boyan Xu, Zhengming Chen, Zhifeng Hao, Peng Cui
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 22

Local Causal Structure Learning in the Presence of Latent Variables and Selection Bias

Discovering the direct causes and effects of a target variable from observational data is a fundamental problem in causal discovery, with broad applications in domains such as gene regulatory analysis and biomedical research. Existing causal discovery methods either learn a global causal structure, which incurs substantial computational cost, or assume the absence of latent variables and selection bias, assumptions that are often violated in real-world settings.

arXiv AI
Aug 24

Foundation Models for Partial Causal Identification

The paper introduces causal foundation models that can bound the effects of interventions and counterfactuals using only observational data. It defines a canonical prior with full support over structural causal models with discrete observables, enabling the translation of counterfactual bounding into learning distributions over functions that map data and structural assumptions to causal queries. This approach extends causal foundational modelling to partially-identifiable causal effects, where unobserved confounding leads to multiple compatible values for the effect.

By Alexis Bellot, Anish Dhir
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Differentiable Structure Learning for Cyclic Linear Gaussian Models with Latent Confounders

The paper introduces a method for learning causal structures in linear Gaussian models that may contain directed cycles and an unknown number of latent confounders, bounded by a maximum. It derives the covariance of observed variables, defines marginal quasi-equivalence to identify when different models produce the same observational distributions, and formulates structure learning as a minimization of Gaussian negative log-likelihood with a complexity penalty counting edges and latent variables. Using Bernoulli gates to parameterize edge and latent inclusion, the authors obtain a closed‑form differentiable objective whose expected value shares the same global optimum as the discrete problem, and demonstrate experimentally that this approach yields lower recovery error than prior methods.

By Sadegh Khorasani, Ali Najar, Saber Salehkaleybar, Negar Kiyavash
arXiv Statistics ML
Oct 5

Flexible Nonparametric Inference for Causal Effects under the Front-Door Model

The paper introduces new one‑step and targeted minimum loss‑based estimators for the average treatment effect and the average treatment effect on the treated under the front‑door criterion. These estimators use multiple parameterizations of the observed data distribution, can avoid modeling the mediator density, and are compatible with flexible machine‑learning nuisance estimation. The authors derive conditions for root‑n consistency, asymptotic linearity, and develop doubly robust tests for identification assumptions, demonstrating improved efficiency and favorable performance in simulations and real‑world applications in education and emergency medicine.

By Anna Guo, David Benkeser, Razieh Nabi
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 2

CIDER-FM: Foundation Models for Causal Inference from Diverse Experimental Regimes

CIDER-FM is a causal foundation model that combines finite observational data with surrogate-interventional datasets to predict target conditional interventional distributions more accurately than using observational data alone. It employs an intervention-aware representation and hierarchical three‑axis attention to integrate information across variables, samples, and experimental regimes. Experiments on synthetic graphs, simulated data, and real‑world Causal Chambers data show that incorporating experimental context improves CID prediction performance.

By Yuche Gao, Arik Reuter, Siyuan Guo, Anish Dhir, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Adrian Weller
arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

Supervised Learning Objectives for High-Dimensional Treatment Effects

The paper proposes supervised learning objectives for estimating causal effects of high‑dimensional treatments, such as text or continuous variables, by recasting causal inference as a learning problem under realizability and no unobserved confounding. It shows that causal error can be decomposed into moment‑balancing errors of increasing order and designs objectives that directly improve causal estimation by exploiting the structure of conditional outcomes. The authors also demonstrate how to project high‑dimensional treatment effects onto coarser attributes, enabling a single model to answer multiple causal questions without extra attribute‑specific training, and validate their approach empirically across continuous, discrete, and text treatments.

By Nikita Dhawan, Arnav Paruthi, Andrew Kim, Lovedeep Gondara, Jekaterina Novikova, Chris J. Maddison