Learning to Defer for Causal Discovery with Imperfect Experts

Integrating expert knowledge, e.g. from large language models, into causal discovery algorithms can be challenging when the knowledge is not guaranteed to be correct. Expert recommendations may contradict data-driven results, and their reliability can vary significantly depending on the domain or specific query. Existing methods based on soft constraints or inconsistencies in predicted causal relationships fail to account for these variations in expertise. To remedy this, we propose L2D-CD, a method for gauging the correctness of expert recommendations and optimally combining them with data-driven causal discovery results. By adapting learning-to-defer (L2D) algorithms for pairwise causal discovery (CD), we learn a deferral function that selects whether to rely on classical causal discovery methods using numerical data or expert recommendations based on textual meta-data. We evaluate L2D-CD on the canonical T\"ubingen pairs dataset and demonstrate its superior performance compared to both the causal discovery method and the expert used in isolation. Moreover, our approach identifies domains where the expert's performance is strong or weak. Finally, we outline a strategy for generalizing this approach to causal discovery on graphs with more than two variables, paving the way for further research in this area.

Zero-Shot Learning of Causal Models

With the increasing acquisition of datasets over time, we now have access to precise and varied descriptions of the world, capturing all sorts of phenomena. These datasets can be seen as empirical observations of unknown causal generative processes, which can commonly be described by Structural Causal Models (SCMs). Recovering these causal generative processes from observations poses formidable challenges, and often require to learn a specific generative model for each dataset. In this work, we propose to learn a \emph{single} model capable of inferring in a zero-shot manner the causal generative processes of datasets. Rather than learning a specific SCM for each dataset, we enable the Fixed-Point Approach (FiP) proposed in~\cite{scetbon2024fip}, to infer the generative SCMs conditionally on their empirical representations. More specifically, we propose to amortize the learning of a conditional version of FiP to infer generative SCMs from observations and causal structures on synthetically generated datasets. We show that our model is capable of predicting in zero-shot the true generative SCMs, and as a by-product, of (i) generating new dataset samples, and (ii) inferring intervened ones. Our experiments demonstrate that our amortized procedure achieves performances on par with SoTA methods trained specifically for each dataset on both in and out-of-distribution problems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that SCMs are inferred in a zero-shot manner from observations, paving the way for a paradigmatic shift towards the assimilation of causal knowledge across datasets.

Compositional Risk Minimization

In this work, we tackle a challenging and extreme form of subpopulation shift, which is termed compositional shift. Under compositional shifts, some combinations of attributes are totally absent from the training distribution but present in the test distribution. We model the data with flexible additive energy distributions, where each energy term represents an attribute, and derive a simple alternative to empirical risk minimization termed compositional risk minimization (CRM). We first train an additive energy classifier to predict the multiple attributes and then adjust this classifier to tackle compositional shifts. We provide an extensive theoretical analysis of CRM, where we show that our proposal extrapolates to special affine hulls of seen attribute combinations. Empirical evaluations on benchmark datasets confirms the improved robustness of CRM compared to other methods from the literature designed to tackle various forms of subpopulation shifts.

Evaluating Interventional Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models

Numerous decision-making tasks require estimating causal effects under interventions on different parts of a system. As practitioners consider using large language models (LLMs) to automate decisions, studying their causal reasoning capabilities becomes crucial. A recent line of work evaluates LLMs ability to retrieve commonsense causal facts, but these evaluations do not sufficiently assess how LLMs reason about interventions. Motivated by the role that interventions play in causal inference, in this paper, we conduct empirical analyses to evaluate whether LLMs can accurately update their knowledge of a data-generating process in response to an intervention. We create benchmarks that span diverse causal graphs (e.g., confounding, mediation) and variable types, and enable a study of intervention-based reasoning. These benchmarks allow us to isolate the ability of LLMs to accurately predict changes resulting from their ability to memorize facts or find other shortcuts. Our analysis on four LLMs highlights that while GPT- 4 models show promising accuracy at predicting the intervention effects, they remain sensitive to distracting factors in the prompts.

Additive Decoders for Latent Variables Identification and Cartesian-Product Extrapolation

We tackle the problems of latent variables identification and "out-of-support" image generation in representation learning. We show that both are possible for a class of decoders that we call additive, which are reminiscent of decoders used for object-centric representation learning (OCRL) and well suited for images that can be decomposed as a sum of object-specific images. We provide conditions under which exactly solving the reconstruction problem using an additive decoder is guaranteed to identify the blocks of latent variables up to permutation and block-wise invertible transformations. This guarantee relies only on very weak assumptions about the distribution of the latent factors, which might present statistical dependencies and have an almost arbitrarily shaped support. Our result provides a new setting where nonlinear independent component analysis (ICA) is possible and adds to our theoretical understanding of OCRL methods. We also show theoretically that additive decoders can generate novel images by recombining observed factors of variations in novel ways, an ability we refer to as Cartesian-product extrapolation. We show empirically that additivity is crucial for both identifiability and extrapolation on simulated data.

Synergies Between Disentanglement and Sparsity: a Multi-Task Learning Perspective

Although disentangled representations are often said to be beneficial for downstream tasks, current empirical and theoretical understanding is limited. In this work, we provide evidence that disentangled representations coupled with sparse base-predictors improve generalization. In the context of multi-task learning, we prove a new identifiability result that provides conditions under which maximally sparse base-predictors yield disentangled representations. Motivated by this theoretical result, we propose a practical approach to learn disentangled representations based on a sparsity-promoting bi-level optimization problem. Finally, we explore a meta-learning version of this algorithm based on group Lasso multiclass SVM base-predictors, for which we derive a tractable dual formulation. It obtains competitive results on standard few-shot classification benchmarks, while each task is using only a fraction of the learned representations.

Empirical Analysis of Model Selection for Heterogenous Causal Effect Estimation

We study the problem of model selection in causal inference, specifically for the case of conditional average treatment effect (CATE) estimation under binary treatments. Unlike model selection in machine learning, we cannot use the technique of cross-validation here as we do not observe the counterfactual potential outcome for any data point. Hence, we need to design model selection techniques that do not explicitly rely on counterfactual data. As an alternative to cross-validation, there have been a variety of proxy metrics proposed in the literature, that depend on auxiliary nuisance models also estimated from the data (propensity score model, outcome regression model). However, the effectiveness of these metrics has only been studied on synthetic datasets as we can observe the counterfactual data for them. We conduct an extensive empirical analysis to judge the performance of these metrics, where we utilize the latest advances in generative modeling to incorporate multiple realistic datasets. We evaluate 9 metrics on 144 datasets for selecting between 415 estimators per dataset, including datasets that closely mimic real-world datasets. Further, we use the latest techniques from AutoML to ensure consistent hyperparameter selection for nuisance models for a fair comparison across metrics.

Interventional Causal Representation Learning

The theory of identifiable representation learning aims to build general-purpose methods that extract high-level latent (causal) factors from low-level sensory data. Most existing works focus on identifiable representation learning with observational data, relying on distributional assumptions on latent (causal) factors. However, in practice, we often also have access to interventional data for representation learning. How can we leverage interventional data to help identify high-level latents? To this end, we explore the role of interventional data for identifiable representation learning in this work. We study the identifiability of latent causal factors with and without interventional data, under minimal distributional assumptions on the latents. We prove that, if the true latent variables map to the observed high-dimensional data via a polynomial function, then representation learning via minimizing the standard reconstruction loss of autoencoders identifies the true latents up to affine transformation. If we further have access to interventional data generated by hard $do$ interventions on some of the latents, then we can identify these intervened latents up to permutation, shift and scaling.

Towards efficient representation identification in supervised learning

Humans have a remarkable ability to disentangle complex sensory inputs (e.g., image, text) into simple factors of variation (e.g., shape, color) without much supervision. This ability has inspired many works that attempt to solve the following question: how do we invert the data generation process to extract those factors with minimal or no supervision? Several works in the literature on non-linear independent component analysis have established this negative result; without some knowledge of the data generation process or appropriate inductive biases, it is impossible to perform this inversion. In recent years, a lot of progress has been made on disentanglement under structural assumptions, e.g., when we have access to auxiliary information that makes the factors of variation conditionally independent. However, existing work requires a lot of auxiliary information, e.g., in supervised classification, it prescribes that the number of label classes should be at least equal to the total dimension of all factors of variation. In this work, we depart from these assumptions and ask: a) How can we get disentanglement when the auxiliary information does not provide conditional independence over the factors of variation? b) Can we reduce the amount of auxiliary information required for disentanglement? For a class of models where auxiliary information does not ensure conditional independence, we show theoretically and experimentally that disentanglement (to a large extent) is possible even when the auxiliary information dimension is much less than the dimension of the true latent representation.

The Connection between Out-of-Distribution Generalization and Privacy of ML Models

With the goal of generalizing to out-of-distribution (OOD) data, recent domain generalization methods aim to learn "stable" feature representations whose effect on the output remains invariant across domains. Given the theoretical connection between generalization and privacy, we ask whether better OOD generalization leads to better privacy for machine learning models, where privacy is measured through robustness to membership inference (MI) attacks. In general, we find that the relationship does not hold. Through extensive evaluation on a synthetic dataset and image datasets like MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and Chest X-rays, we show that a lower OOD generalization gap does not imply better robustness to MI attacks. Instead, privacy benefits are based on the extent to which a model captures the stable features. A model that captures stable features is more robust to MI attacks than models that exhibit better OOD generalization but do not learn stable features. Further, for the same provable differential privacy guarantees, a model that learns stable features provides higher utility as compared to others. Our results offer the first extensive empirical study connecting stable features and privacy, and also have a takeaway for the domain generalization community; MI attack can be used as a complementary metric to measure model quality.