Differentiable causal discovery for latent hierarchical causal models
Prashant, Parjanya Ng, Ignavier Zhang, Kun Huang, Biwei
Prashant, Parjanya
Ng, Ignavier
Zhang, Kun
Huang, Biwei
Supervisor
Department
Machine Learning
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Type
Conference proceeding
Date
2025
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Language
English
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Abstract
Discovering causal structures with latent variables from observational data is a fundamental challenge in causal discovery. Existing methods often rely on constraint-based, iterative discrete searches, limiting their scalability for large numbers of variables. Moreover, these methods frequently assume linearity or invertibility, restricting their applicability to real-world scenarios. We present new theoretical results on the identifiability of non-linear latent hierarchical causal models, relaxing previous assumptions in the literature about the deterministic nature of latent variables and exogenous noise. Building on these insights, we develop a novel differentiable causal discovery algorithm that efficiently estimates the structure of such models. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to propose a differentiable causal discovery method for non-linear latent hierarchical models. Our approach outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and scalability. Furthermore, we demonstrate its practical utility by learning interpretable hierarchical latent structures from high-dimensional image data and demonstrate its effectiveness on downstream tasks such as transfer learning. © 2025 13th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2025. All rights reserved.
Citation
P. P. Prashant, I. Ng, K. Zhang, and B. Huang, “Differentiable Causal Discovery for Latent Hierarchical Causal Models,” International Conference on Representation Learning, vol. 2025, pp. 31850–31875, May 2025
Source
13th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2025
Conference
13th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2025
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Source
13th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2025
Publisher
International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR