We consider the problem of partial identification, the estimation of bounds on the treatment effects from observational data. Although studied using discrete treatment variables or in specific causal graphs (e.g., instrumental variables), partial identification has been recently explored using tools from deep generative modeling. We propose a new method for partial identification of average treatment effects (ATEs) in general causal graphs using implicit generative models comprising continuous and discrete random variables. Since ATE with continuous treatment is generally non-regular, we leverage the partial derivatives of response functions to define a regular approximation of ATE, a quantity we call uniform average treatment derivative (UATD). We prove that our algorithm converges to tight bounds on ATE in linear structural causal models (SCMs). For nonlinear SCMs, we empirically show that using UATD leads to tighter and more stable bounds than methods that directly optimize the ATE.

Speech synthesis is an important practical generative modeling problem that has seen great progress over the last few years, with likelihood-based autoregressive neural models now outperforming traditional concatenative systems. A downside of such autoregressive models is that they require executing tens of thousands of sequential operations per second of generated audio, making them ill-suited for deployment on specialized deep learning hardware. Here, we propose a new learning method that allows us to train highly parallel models of speech, without requiring access to an analytical likelihood function. Our approach is based on a generalized energy distance between the distributions of the generated and real audio. This spectral energy distance is a proper scoring rule with respect to the distribution over magnitude-spectrograms of the generated waveform audio and offers statistical consistency guarantees. The distance can be calculated from minibatches without bias, and does not involve adversarial learning, yielding a stable and consistent method for training implicit generative models. Empirically, we achieve state-of-the-art generation quality among implicit generative models, as judged by the recently-proposed cFDSD metric. When combining our method with adversarial techniques, we also improve upon the recently-proposed GAN-TTS model in terms of Mean Opinion Score as judged by trained human evaluators.

Synthetic data generation has become a key ingredient for training machine learning procedures, addressing tasks such as data augmentation, analysing privacy-sensitive data, or visualising representative samples. Assessing the quality of such synthetic data generators hence has to be addressed. As (deep) generative models for synthetic data often do not admit explicit probability distributions, classical statistical procedures for assessing model goodness-of-fit may not be applicable. In this paper, we propose a principled procedure to assess the quality of a synthetic data generator. The procedure is a Kernelised Stein Discrepancy-type test which is based on a non-parametric Stein operator for the synthetic data generator of interest. This operator is estimated from samples which are obtained from the synthetic data generator and hence can be applied even when the model is only implicit. In contrast to classical testing, the sample size from the synthetic data generator can be as large as desired, while the size of the observed data that the generator aims to emulate is fixed. Experimental results on synthetic distributions and trained generative models on synthetic and real datasets illustrate that the method shows improved power performance compared to existing approaches.

This spectral energy distance is a proper scoring rule with respect to the distribution over magnitude-spectrograms of the generated waveform audio and offers statistical consistency guarantees.

Rank-based statistical metrics, such as the invariant statistical loss (ISL), have recently emerged as robust and practically effective tools for training implicit generative models. In this work, we introduce dual-ISL, a novel likelihood-free objective for training implicit generative models that interchanges the roles of the target and model distributions in the ISL framework, yielding a convex optimization problem in the space of model densities. We prove that the resulting rank-based discrepancy $d_K$ is i) continuous under weak convergence and with respect to the $L^1$ norm, and ii) convex in its first argument-properties not shared by classical divergences such as KL or Wasserstein distances. Building on this, we develop a theoretical framework that interprets $d_K$ as an $L^2$-projection of the density ratio $q = p/\tilde p$ onto a Bernstein polynomial basis, from which we derive exact bounds on the truncation error, precise convergence rates, and a closed-form expression for the truncated density approximation. We further extend our analysis to the multivariate setting via random one-dimensional projections, defining a sliced dual-ISL divergence that retains both convexity and continuity. We empirically show that these theoretical advantages translate into practical ones. Specifically, across several benchmarks dual-ISL converges more rapidly, delivers markedly smoother and more stable training, and more effectively prevents mode collapse than classical ISL and other leading implicit generative methods-while also providing an explicit density approximation.

We consider the problem of partial identification, the estimation of bounds on the treatment effects from observational data. Although studied using discrete treatment variables or in specific causal graphs (e.g., instrumental variables), partial identification has been recently explored using tools from deep generative modeling. We propose a new method for partial identification of average treatment effects (ATEs) in general causal graphs using implicit generative models comprising continuous and discrete random variables. Since ATE with continuous treatment is generally non-regular, we leverage the partial derivatives of response functions to define a regular approximation of ATE, a quantity we call uniform average treatment derivative (UATD). We prove that our algorithm converges to tight bounds on ATE in linear structural causal models (SCMs).

We consider the problem of partial identification, the estimation of bounds on the treatment effects from observational data. Although studied using discrete treatment variables or in specific causal graphs (e.g., instrumental variables), partial identification has been recently explored using tools from deep generative modeling. We propose a new method for partial identification of average treatment effects (ATEs) in general causal graphs using implicit generative models comprising continuous and discrete random variables. Since ATE with continuous treatment is generally non-regular, we leverage the partial derivatives of response functions to define a regular approximation of ATE, a quantity we call uniform average treatment derivative (UATD). We prove that our algorithm converges to tight bounds on ATE in linear structural causal models (SCMs).

Traditional implicit generative models are capable of learning highly complex data distributions. However, their training involves distinguishing real data from synthetically generated data using adversarial discriminators, which can lead to unstable training dynamics and mode dropping issues. In this work, we build on the \textit{invariant statistical loss} (ISL) method introduced in \cite{de2024training}, and extend it to handle heavy-tailed and multivariate data distributions. The data generated by many real-world phenomena can only be properly characterised using heavy-tailed probability distributions, and traditional implicit methods struggle to effectively capture their asymptotic behavior. To address this problem, we introduce a generator trained with ISL, that uses input noise from a generalised Pareto distribution (GPD). We refer to this generative scheme as Pareto-ISL for conciseness. Our experiments demonstrate that Pareto-ISL accurately models the tails of the distributions while still effectively capturing their central characteristics. The original ISL function was conceived for 1D data sets. When the actual data is $n$-dimensional, a straightforward extension of the method was obtained by targeting the $n$ marginal distributions of the data. This approach is computationally infeasible and ineffective in high-dimensional spaces. To overcome this, we extend the 1D approach using random projections and define a new loss function suited for multivariate data, keeping problems tractable by adjusting the number of projections. We assess its performance in multidimensional generative modeling and explore its potential as a pretraining technique for generative adversarial networks (GANs) to prevent mode collapse, reporting promising results and highlighting its robustness across various hyperparameter settings.