Learning Robust Intervention Representations with Delta Embeddings

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Alimisis, Panagiotis, Diou, Christos
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Alimisis, Panagiotis
Diou, Christos
author_facet Alimisis, Panagiotis
Diou, Christos
contents Causal representation learning has attracted significant research interest during the past few years, as a means for improving model generalization and robustness. Causal representations of interventional image pairs (also called ``actionable counterfactuals'' in the literature), have the property that only variables corresponding to scene elements affected by the intervention / action are changed between the start state and the end state. While most work in this area has focused on identifying and representing the variables of the scene under a causal model, fewer efforts have focused on representations of the interventions themselves. In this work, we show that an effective strategy for improving out of distribution (OOD) robustness is to focus on the representation of actionable counterfactuals in the latent space. Specifically, we propose that an intervention can be represented by a Causal Delta Embedding that is invariant to the visual scene and sparse in terms of the causal variables it affects. Leveraging this insight, we propose a method for learning causal representations from image pairs, without any additional supervision. Experiments in the Causal Triplet challenge demonstrate that Causal Delta Embeddings are highly effective in OOD settings, significantly exceeding baseline performance in both synthetic and real-world benchmarks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_04492
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Robust Intervention Representations with Delta Embeddings
Alimisis, Panagiotis
Diou, Christos
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Causal representation learning has attracted significant research interest during the past few years, as a means for improving model generalization and robustness. Causal representations of interventional image pairs (also called ``actionable counterfactuals'' in the literature), have the property that only variables corresponding to scene elements affected by the intervention / action are changed between the start state and the end state. While most work in this area has focused on identifying and representing the variables of the scene under a causal model, fewer efforts have focused on representations of the interventions themselves. In this work, we show that an effective strategy for improving out of distribution (OOD) robustness is to focus on the representation of actionable counterfactuals in the latent space. Specifically, we propose that an intervention can be represented by a Causal Delta Embedding that is invariant to the visual scene and sparse in terms of the causal variables it affects. Leveraging this insight, we propose a method for learning causal representations from image pairs, without any additional supervision. Experiments in the Causal Triplet challenge demonstrate that Causal Delta Embeddings are highly effective in OOD settings, significantly exceeding baseline performance in both synthetic and real-world benchmarks.
title Learning Robust Intervention Representations with Delta Embeddings
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04492