Causal Diffusion Autoencoders: Toward Counterfactual Generation via Diffusion Probabilistic Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Komanduri, Aneesh, Zhao, Chen, Chen, Feng, Wu, Xintao
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Komanduri, Aneesh
Zhao, Chen
Chen, Feng
Wu, Xintao
author_facet Komanduri, Aneesh
Zhao, Chen
Chen, Feng
Wu, Xintao
contents Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have become the state-of-the-art in high-quality image generation. However, DPMs have an arbitrary noisy latent space with no interpretable or controllable semantics. Although there has been significant research effort to improve image sample quality, there is little work on representation-controlled generation using diffusion models. Specifically, causal modeling and controllable counterfactual generation using DPMs is an underexplored area. In this work, we propose CausalDiffAE, a diffusion-based causal representation learning framework to enable counterfactual generation according to a specified causal model. Our key idea is to use an encoder to extract high-level semantically meaningful causal variables from high-dimensional data and model stochastic variation using reverse diffusion. We propose a causal encoding mechanism that maps high-dimensional data to causally related latent factors and parameterize the causal mechanisms among latent factors using neural networks. To enforce the disentanglement of causal variables, we formulate a variational objective and leverage auxiliary label information in a prior to regularize the latent space. We propose a DDIM-based counterfactual generation procedure subject to do-interventions. Finally, to address the limited label supervision scenario, we also study the application of CausalDiffAE when a part of the training data is unlabeled, which also enables granular control over the strength of interventions in generating counterfactuals during inference. We empirically show that CausalDiffAE learns a disentangled latent space and is capable of generating high-quality counterfactual images.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_17735
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Causal Diffusion Autoencoders: Toward Counterfactual Generation via Diffusion Probabilistic Models
Komanduri, Aneesh
Zhao, Chen
Chen, Feng
Wu, Xintao
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Methodology
Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have become the state-of-the-art in high-quality image generation. However, DPMs have an arbitrary noisy latent space with no interpretable or controllable semantics. Although there has been significant research effort to improve image sample quality, there is little work on representation-controlled generation using diffusion models. Specifically, causal modeling and controllable counterfactual generation using DPMs is an underexplored area. In this work, we propose CausalDiffAE, a diffusion-based causal representation learning framework to enable counterfactual generation according to a specified causal model. Our key idea is to use an encoder to extract high-level semantically meaningful causal variables from high-dimensional data and model stochastic variation using reverse diffusion. We propose a causal encoding mechanism that maps high-dimensional data to causally related latent factors and parameterize the causal mechanisms among latent factors using neural networks. To enforce the disentanglement of causal variables, we formulate a variational objective and leverage auxiliary label information in a prior to regularize the latent space. We propose a DDIM-based counterfactual generation procedure subject to do-interventions. Finally, to address the limited label supervision scenario, we also study the application of CausalDiffAE when a part of the training data is unlabeled, which also enables granular control over the strength of interventions in generating counterfactuals during inference. We empirically show that CausalDiffAE learns a disentangled latent space and is capable of generating high-quality counterfactual images.
title Causal Diffusion Autoencoders: Toward Counterfactual Generation via Diffusion Probabilistic Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17735