Cross-Treatment Effect Estimation for Multi-Category, Multi-Valued Causal Inference via Dynamic Neural Masking

Ke, Xiaopeng, Yu, Yihan, Zhang, Ruyue, Zhou, Zhishuo, Shi, Fangzhou, Men, Chang, Zhu, Zhengdan

arXiv.org Machine Learning 

Counterfactual causal inference faces significant challenges when extended to multi-category, multi-valued treatments, where complex cross-effects between heterogeneous interventions are difficult to model. Existing methodologies remain constrained to binary or single-type treatments and suffer from restrictive assumptions, limited scalability, and inadequate evaluation frameworks for complex intervention scenarios. We present XTNet, a novel network architecture for multi-category, multi-valued treatment effect estimation. Our approach introduces a cross-effect estimation module with dynamic masking mechanisms to capture treatment interactions without restrictive structural assumptions. The architecture employs a decomposition strategy separating basic effects from cross-treatment interactions, enabling efficient modeling of combinatorial treatment spaces. We also propose MCMV-AUCC, a suitable evaluation metric that accounts for treatment costs and interaction effects. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that XTNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both ranking accuracy and effect estimation quality. The results of the real-world A/B test further confirm its effectiveness.