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Main Authors: Bagi, Shayan Shirahmad Gale, Gharaee, Zahra, Schulte, Oliver, Crowley, Mark
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11124
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author Bagi, Shayan Shirahmad Gale
Gharaee, Zahra
Schulte, Oliver
Crowley, Mark
author_facet Bagi, Shayan Shirahmad Gale
Gharaee, Zahra
Schulte, Oliver
Crowley, Mark
contents Learning causal representations from observational and interventional data in the absence of known ground-truth graph structures necessitates implicit latent causal representation learning. Implicit learning of causal mechanisms typically involves two categories of interventional data: hard and soft interventions. In real-world scenarios, soft interventions are often more realistic than hard interventions, as the latter require fully controlled environments. Unlike hard interventions, which directly force changes in a causal variable, soft interventions exert influence indirectly by affecting the causal mechanism. However, the subtlety of soft interventions impose several challenges for learning causal models. One challenge is that soft intervention's effects are ambiguous, since parental relations remain intact. In this paper, we tackle the challenges of learning causal models using soft interventions while retaining implicit modelling. We propose ICLR-SM, which models the effects of soft interventions by employing a causal mechanism switch variable designed to toggle between different causal mechanisms. In our experiments, we consistently observe improved learning of identifiable, causal representations, compared to baseline approaches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_11124
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Implicit Causal Representation Learning via Switchable Mechanisms
Bagi, Shayan Shirahmad Gale
Gharaee, Zahra
Schulte, Oliver
Crowley, Mark
Machine Learning
Learning causal representations from observational and interventional data in the absence of known ground-truth graph structures necessitates implicit latent causal representation learning. Implicit learning of causal mechanisms typically involves two categories of interventional data: hard and soft interventions. In real-world scenarios, soft interventions are often more realistic than hard interventions, as the latter require fully controlled environments. Unlike hard interventions, which directly force changes in a causal variable, soft interventions exert influence indirectly by affecting the causal mechanism. However, the subtlety of soft interventions impose several challenges for learning causal models. One challenge is that soft intervention's effects are ambiguous, since parental relations remain intact. In this paper, we tackle the challenges of learning causal models using soft interventions while retaining implicit modelling. We propose ICLR-SM, which models the effects of soft interventions by employing a causal mechanism switch variable designed to toggle between different causal mechanisms. In our experiments, we consistently observe improved learning of identifiable, causal representations, compared to baseline approaches.
title Implicit Causal Representation Learning via Switchable Mechanisms
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11124