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Iterative Causal Discovery: Per-Edge Impossibility Certificates, Tier-Aware Oracle Queries, and the $1+K$ Lower Bound

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Causal-discovery algorithms return a directed graph, yet provide no principled means of distinguishing edge directions identified by the data from those assigned without an identifying assumption. Under the standard Markov and faithfulness conditions, the observational distribution identifies only a Markov equivalence class; orientations within that class are not determined by the joint distribution and cannot be recovered from additional samples alone, but require either a functional restriction or an intervention. We introduce a protocol for observational causal discovery on continuous data that attaches to each candidate edge a discrete impossibility certificate: a RESOLVED code records the identifiability theorem under which the direction was committed, while an IMPOSSIBLE code records the failure mode together with the specific question a domain expert must answer to resolve it. The bivariate cascade is extended with five gated identifiability tiers LSNM, IGCI, Stein, MDL, and PEIT that abstain when their precondition test rejects. Two oracle primitives, the meta-hub query and the node-children query, jointly establish an upper bound of $1+K$ expert interactions sufficient to recover any DAG, where $K$ denotes the number of non-leaf vertices. Under an ideal-oracle assumption, the bound is met exactly on the asia, sachs, child, and alarm benchmarks.


Interpretable Machine Learning for Spatial Science: A Lie-Algebraic Kernel for Rotationally Anisotropic Gaussian Processes

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Many three-dimensional spatial fields are anisotropic, with directions of rapid and slow variation that need not align with the coordinate axes. Standard Gaussian process kernels with Automatic Relevance Determination (ARD) capture only axis-aligned anisotropy, while generic full symmetric positive definite (SPD) metrics can represent rotated anisotropy but do not parameterise principal length-scales and directions directly. We introduce an interpretable rotationally anisotropic GP kernel that parameterises a three-dimensional SPD covariance metric using three principal length-scales and an explicit SO(3) rotation. The rotation is represented by an axis-angle vector and mapped to SO(3) via the Lie-algebra exponential map, giving unconstrained Euclidean coordinates for inference while always inducing a valid SPD metric. The construction spans the same family of three-dimensional SPD covariance metrics as a generic full-SPD parameterisation, but exposes the geometry differently: length-scales and orientation are explicit, interpretable, and directly available for prior specification and posterior summaries. We perform Bayesian inference on these quantities using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), and characterise the resulting symmetries and weakly identified regimes. On synthetic data with rotated anisotropy, the posterior recovers the generating metric and improves prediction relative to an axis-aligned ARD baseline, while matching the predictive performance of a generic full SPD baseline. When the ground truth is axis-aligned, posterior mass concentrates near the identity rotation and predictive performance matches ARD. On a material-density dataset from a laboratory-fabricated nano-brick, the inferred metric reveals rotated anisotropy that is not captured by axis-aligned kernels.



HOH: Markerless Multimodal Human-Object-Human Handover Dataset with Large Object Count

Neural Information Processing Systems

We present the HOH (Human-Object-Human) Handover Dataset, a large object count dataset with 136 objects, to accelerate data-driven research on handover studies, human-robot handover implementation, and artificial intelligence (AI) on handover parameter estimation from 2D and 3D data of two-person interactions. HOH contains multi-view RGB and depth data, skeletons, fused point clouds, grasp type and handedness labels, object, giver hand, and receiver hand 2D and 3D segmentations, giver and receiver comfort ratings, and paired object metadata and aligned 3D models for 2,720 handover interactions spanning 136 objects and 20 giver-receiver pairs--40 with role-reversal--organized from 40 participants. We also show experimental results of neural networks trained using HOH to perform grasp, orientation, and trajectory prediction. As the only fully markerless handover capture dataset, HOH represents natural human-human handover interactions, overcoming challenges with markered datasets that require specific suiting for body tracking, and lack high-resolution hand tracking. To date, HOH is the largest handover dataset in terms of object count, participant count, pairs with role reversal accounted for, and total interactions captured.



H2RBox-v2: Incorporating Symmetry for Boosting Horizontal Box Supervised Oriented Object Detection

Neural Information Processing Systems

With the rapidly increasing demand for oriented object detection, e.g. in autonomous driving and remote sensing, the recently proposed paradigm involving weakly-supervised detector H2RBox for learning rotated box (RBox) from the more readily-available horizontal box (HBox) has shown promise. This paper presents H2RBox-v2, to further bridge the gap between HBox-supervised and RBox-supervised oriented object detection. Specifically, we propose to leverage the reflection symmetry via flip and rotate consistencies, using a weakly-supervised network branch similar to H2RBox, together with a novel self-supervised branch that learns orientations from the symmetry inherent in visual objects. The detector is further stabilized and enhanced by practical techniques to cope with peripheral issues e.g.


ATraining Regime

Neural Information Processing Systems

A.1 Implementation of the GPs We use the GPyTorch4 package for the computations of GPs and their kernels. The NN linear kernel is implemented in all experiments as a 1-layer MLP with ReLU activations and hidden dimension 16. For the Spectral Mixture Kernel, we use 4 mixtures. A.2 Sines Dataset For the first experiments on sines functions, we use the dataset from [9]. For each task, the input points x are sampled from the range [ 5,5], and the target values y are obtained by applying y = Asin(x ')+, where the amplitude A and phase ' are drawn uniformly at random from ranges [0.1,5] and [0, ], respectively.



Supplementary Material: Iterative Causal Discovery in the Possible Presence of Latent Confounders and Selection Bias

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this section we provide a detailed proof for the correctness and completeness of the ICD algorithm. For easier referencing we describe ICD in Algorithm 1, and describe the ICD-Sep conditions. A set Zis a subset of ICD-Sep(A,B) given r {0,...,|O| 2}, if and only if 1. |Z|= r, 2. Z Z, there exists a PDS-path ΠB(A,Z) such that, (a) |ΠB(A,Z)| r and (b) every node on ΠB(A,Z) is in Z, and 3. Z Z, node Z is a possible ancestor of Aor B (not a necessary condition). Denote A,B a pair of nodes from O that are connected in G and disconnected in D, and such that Ais not an ancestor of B in D. If A B |[Z0] S, where Z0 O is a minimal separating set having size n+ 1, then there exists a subset Z O having the same size of n+ 1 such that that A B |Z S, and for every node Z Zthere exists a PDS-path ΠB(A,Z) in G, such that every node V on the PDS-path is also in Z. Proof. It was previously shown that a minimal separating set for Aand B, where Ais not an ancestor of B, is a subset of D-Sep(A,B) (Spirtes et al., 2000, page 134 and Theorem 6.2; Spirtes et al., 1999).


Further Details

Neural Information Processing Systems

A.1 Dataset Details The 20 micro-variations of the 5 macro-variations of the scene were created with the rule of swapping at least two furniture pieces and perturbing the positions of a subset of the other furniture pieces. The occurrences of various furniture objects in these 100 micro-variations are illustrated in Figure 1. Several furniture objects such as'Beanbag' and'Chair' occur more frequently with multiple instances in a some scenes while others such as'Table 03' occur less frequently. We also analyze the object categories of all objects in the original 6 'FRL-apartment' space recreations. We map each of the 92 objects to a semantic category and list the counts per semantic category in a histogram in Figure 1. Since these spaces have a large kitchen area, there is a larger ratio of kitchen objects such as'Kitchen utensil' and'Bowl'. Top down views of the 5 'macro variations' of the scenes are shown in Figure 1. These variations are 5 semantically plausible configurations of furniture in the space generated by a 3D artist. Each surface is annotated with a bounding box, enabling procedural placement of objects on the surfaces. For each of these 5 variations, we generate 20 additional variations, giving 105 scene layouts. Objects are procedurally added on furniture and surfaces using the annotated supporting surface and containment volume information provided by ReplicaCAD.