causality direction
Efficiently Disentangle Causal Representations
Li, Yuanpeng, Hestness, Joel, Elhoseiny, Mohamed, Zhao, Liang, Church, Kenneth
This paper proposes an efficient approach to learning disentangled representations with causal mechanisms based on the difference of conditional probabilities in original and new distributions. We approximate the difference with models' generalization abilities so that it fits in the standard machine learning framework and can be efficiently computed. In contrast to the state-of-the-art approach, which relies on the learner's adaptation speed to new distribution, the proposed approach only requires evaluating the model's generalization ability. We provide a theoretical explanation for the advantage of the proposed method, and our experiments show that the proposed technique is 1.9-11.0 Causal reasoning is a fundamental tool that has shown significant impact in different disciplines (Rubin & Waterman, 2006; Ramsey et al., 2010; Rotmensch et al., 2017; Schölkopf et al., 2021), and it has roots in work by David Hume in the eighteenth century (Hume, 2003) and classical AI (Pearl, 2003). Causality has been mainly studied from a statistical perspective (Pearl, 2009; Peters et al., 2016; Greenland et al., 1999; Pearl, 2018) with Judea Pearl's work on the causal calculus leading its statistical development. More recently, there has been a growing interest in integrating statistical techniques into machine learning to leverage their benefits. Welling raises a particular question about how to disentangle correlation from causation in machine learning settings to take advantage of the sample efficiency and generalization abilities of causal reasoning (Welling, 2015). Although machine learning has achieved important results on a variety of tasks like computer vision and games over the past decade (e.g., Mnih et al. (2015); Silver et al. (2017); Szegedy et al. (2017); Hudson & Manning (2018)), current approaches can struggle to generalize when the test data distribution is much different from the training distribution (common in real applications). Further, these successful methods are typically "data-hungry", requiring an abundance of labeled examples to perform well across data distributions. In statistical settings, encoding the causal structure in models has been shown to have significant efficiency advantages.