arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 16

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
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 23

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.

By Andreas Sauter, Saber Salehkaleybar, Frank van Harmelen, Aske Plaat, Erman Acar