arXiv Machine Learning

Nonparametric Partial Disentanglement via Mechanism Sparsity: Sparse Actions, Interventions and Sparse Temporal Dependencies

arXiv:2401. 04890v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This work introduces a novel principle for disentanglement we call mechanism sparsity regularization, which applies when the latent factors of interest depend sparsely on observed auxiliary variables and/or past latent factors.

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 Statistics ML
Aug 25

Neuro-Causal Factor Analysis

Neuro-Causal Factor Analysis (NCFA) reimagines traditional factor analysis by integrating causal structure learning and deep generative modeling. The method learns a directed graph linking latent and observed variables, then trains a deep generative model that respects the graph’s Markov factorization. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets show NCFA achieves lower reconstruction error than standard FA and better latent distribution recovery than a variational autoencoder, while offering a sparser architecture, reduced complexity, and causal interpretability.

By Alex Markham, Mingyu Liu, Bryon Aragam, Liam Solus
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

I Act Therefore I Am: When Is JEPA's Action-Conditioning Enough to Learn Causal Mechanisms?

The paper studies when joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) can recover underlying causal states from high‑dimensional observations. It introduces a latent variable model where observations arise from causal states with action‑conditioned dynamics, and proposes an information‑theoretic objective that maximizes conditional likelihood while preserving state entropy. The authors prove identifiability conditions—particularly sufficient action‑induced variation—and instantiate the objective as an action‑modulated Gaussian additive‑noise model (A‑JEPA), demonstrating theoretical and empirical success in synthetic and visual benchmarks.

By Yuhang Liu, Zhuo Huang, Javen Qinfeng Shi