arXiv Machine Learning

ACTIVA: Amortized Causal Effect Estimation via Variational Autoencoders

ACTIVA is a transformer‑based conditional variational autoencoder designed to estimate full interventional distributions from observational data without requiring interventional data, a causal graph, or per‑task fitting. It learns a conditional latent prior that amortizes causal knowledge across diverse training tasks, enabling a single forward pass to handle new causal models drawn from the training distribution. Empirical results on synthetic and biologically realistic gene‑expression simulations show that ACTIVA outperforms correlational baselines, reduces spurious non‑descendant effects, and matches strong amortized baselines, while also validating its theoretical mixture‑of‑distributions property on observationally equivalent models.

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 AI

Jun 17

FoundCause: Causal Discovery with Latent Confounders from Observational Data

arXiv:2606. 17516v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal discovery from observational data remains challenging due to the need to recover directed structure and latent confounding without interventions.

By Patrick Bl\"obaum, Krishnakumar Balasubramanian, Shiva Prasad Kasiviswanathan

llms

arXiv AI

Jul 17

Generative Synthetic Data for Causal Inference: Pitfalls, Remedies, and Opportunities

arXiv:2604. 23904v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Synthetic tabular data are often evaluated by distributional similarity, privacy distance, or train-on-synthetic-test-on-real predictive performance, but these criteria do not ensure validity for causal inference.

By Yichen Xu

llms diffusion benchmarks safety

arXiv AI

Sep 10

When and Why LLM Causal Priors Help: Closed-Loop Prior Selection for Amortized Causal Inference

arXiv:2609.06941v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal effect estimation asks how an outcome would change under an intervention, and medicine, economics, and public policy all treat it as a foundatio...

By Haohao Zhou

llms

arXiv Machine Learning

Jun 9

Causal Representation Learning from Network Data

arXiv:2509. 01916v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Causal disentanglement from soft interventions is identifiable under the assumptions of linear interventional faithfulness and availability of both observational and interventional data.

By Jifan Zhang, Michelle M. Li, Elena Zheleva

arXiv Machine Learning

Aug 12

Causal Variational Deep Embedding: A Family of Interventional Generators for Confounded Images

arXiv:2606. 21806v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep generative models reproduce the observational distribution of their training data, inheriting any spurious associations it contains.

By Jingyuan Chen, Kangrui Ruan, Junzhe Zhang

rag benchmarks

arXiv Machine Learning

Sep 23

Learning to Fluctuate: Statistical Foundations for Causal Tabular Pretraining

arXiv:2609. 26290v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal tabular foundation models amortize effect estimation across synthetic mechanisms, but latent-effect supervision rewards posterior shrinkage instead of directly encoding the repeated-sample response needed in a fixed deployment population.

By Zhiheng Zhang

safety

arXiv Machine Learning

Jul 10

Partial Causal Structure Learning for Valid Selective Conformal Inference under Interventions

arXiv:2603. 02204v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Selective conformal prediction can yield substantially tighter uncertainty sets when we can identify calibration examples that are exchangeable with the test example.

By Amir Asiaee, Kavey Aryan, James P. Long

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

arXiv Machine Learning

Aug 19

TabCausal: Pretraining Across Causal Environments for Tabular Causal Discovery

TabCausal is a causal discovery foundation model that learns to map datasets directly to causal graphs by pretraining across diverse causal environments. It uses a dynamic task construction strategy to expose the model to varied graph priors, mechanisms, noise models, dimensions, sample sizes, and intervention regimes, improving transferability from observational and mixed‑interventional data. On large synthetic benchmarks and a new protocol‑guided semantic benchmark, TabCausal outperforms many classical baselines and shows robust structure recovery, especially when interventional evidence is available.

By Zi-Rong Li, Si-Yang Liu, Tian-Zuo Wang, Han-Jia Ye

llms benchmarks

arXiv Machine Learning

Sep 10

Representation Learning for Sample-Efficient CATE Estimation by Leveraging Multiple Outcomes

arXiv:2609.06294v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATE) enables efficient targeting of interventions, but many applications have limited experimental s...

By Maitreyi Swaroop, Shikha Bhat, Samantha Rodriguez, Tamar Krishnamurti, Bryan Wilder

safety

arXiv AI

5d ago

A Foundation Model for Policy In-Context Longitudinal Causal Effect Estimation

The paper introduces PICLE-PFN, a foundation model for longitudinal causal effect estimation that handles dynamic treatment policies. It represents policies via in-context history-decision demonstrations and is pretrained on synthetic data from longitudinal structural causal models, enabling it to predict conditional average potential outcomes in a single forward pass without task-specific training. Experiments on synthetic and semi-synthetic benchmarks show competitive RMSE and better uncertainty calibration while reducing deployment runtime compared to conventional estimators.

By Wenxin Chen, Kyra Gan, Mingyu Lu, Zilin Jing, Fei Wang, Hoifung Poon, Tristan Naumann, Peniel Argaw

benchmarks

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