Distributionally Robust Causal Abstractions

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Felekis, Yorgos, Damoulas, Theodoros, Giampouras, Paris
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Felekis, Yorgos
Damoulas, Theodoros
Giampouras, Paris
author_facet Felekis, Yorgos
Damoulas, Theodoros
Giampouras, Paris
contents Causal Abstraction (CA) theory provides a principled framework for relating causal models that describe the same system at different levels of granularity while ensuring interventional consistency between them. Recent methods for learning CAs, however, assume fixed and well-specified exogenous distributions, leaving them vulnerable to environmental shifts and model misspecification. In this work, we address these limitations by introducing the first class of distributionally robust CAs and their associated learning algorithms. The latter cast robust causal abstraction learning as a constrained min-max optimization problem with Wasserstein ambiguity sets. We provide theoretical guarantees for both empirical and Gaussian environments, enabling principled selection of ambiguity set radii and establish quantitative guarantees on worst-case abstraction error. Furthermore, we present empirical evidence across different problems and CA learning methods, demonstrating our framework's robustness not only to environmental shifts but also to structural and intervention mapping misspecification.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_04842
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Distributionally Robust Causal Abstractions
Felekis, Yorgos
Damoulas, Theodoros
Giampouras, Paris
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Causal Abstraction (CA) theory provides a principled framework for relating causal models that describe the same system at different levels of granularity while ensuring interventional consistency between them. Recent methods for learning CAs, however, assume fixed and well-specified exogenous distributions, leaving them vulnerable to environmental shifts and model misspecification. In this work, we address these limitations by introducing the first class of distributionally robust CAs and their associated learning algorithms. The latter cast robust causal abstraction learning as a constrained min-max optimization problem with Wasserstein ambiguity sets. We provide theoretical guarantees for both empirical and Gaussian environments, enabling principled selection of ambiguity set radii and establish quantitative guarantees on worst-case abstraction error. Furthermore, we present empirical evidence across different problems and CA learning methods, demonstrating our framework's robustness not only to environmental shifts but also to structural and intervention mapping misspecification.
title Distributionally Robust Causal Abstractions
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04842