arXiv:2507.05412cs.LGstat.ME2025-07

让模型在干预后更稳定,通过强制表示间独立性提升鲁棒性。

Incorporating Interventional Independence Improves Robustness against Interventional Distribution Shift

  • 基于因果图,显式约束干预节点与其非后代的表示独立。
  • 在少量干预数据下,测试误差降低40%以上,性能差距缩小至15%以内。
  • 适用于图像、文本等多模态任务,对连续与离散变量均有效。

我们研究在已知因果图的情况下,如何从被动观测数据和针对部分潜变量的靶向干预数据中学习对干预分布偏移具有鲁棒性的判别表示。现有方法将观测与干预数据同等处理,忽略了干预带来的统计独立性关系,导致模型在观测与干预数据上表现差异显著,尤其当干预数据稀缺时恶化。本文首先发现性能差异与表示违反干预诱导的独立性密切相关;其次,对线性模型推导出保证干预数据测试误差下降的干预数据比例下界;进而提出RepLIn算法,显式强制干预期间被干预节点与其非后代表示间的统计独立性。在合成数据及真实图像与文本数据(人脸属性分类与毒性检测)上的实验表明,RepLIn可有效提升鲁棒性,且在因果节点数增加时仍保持可扩展性,相较ERM基线显著改善了干预数据下的预测性能。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

We study the problem of learning robust discriminative representations of causally related latent variables given the underlying causal graph and a training set comprising passively collected observational data and interventional data obtained through targeted interventions on some of these latent variables. We desire to learn representations that are robust against the resulting interventional distribution shifts. Existing approaches treat observational and interventional data alike, ignoring the independence relations arising from these interventions, even with known underlying causal models. As a result, their representations lead to large predictive performance disparities between observational and interventional data. This performance disparity worsens when interventional training data is scarce. In this paper, (1) we first identify a strong correlation between this performance disparity and the representations' violation of statistical independence induced during interventions. (2) For linear models, we derive sufficient conditions on the proportion of interventional training data, for which enforcing statistical independence between representations of the intervened node and its non-descendants during interventions lowers the test-time error on interventional data. Combining these insights, (3) we propose RepLIn, a training algorithm that explicitly enforces this statistical independence between interventional representations. We demonstrate the utility of RepLIn on a synthetic dataset, and on real image and text datasets on facial attribute classification and toxicity detection, respectively, with semi-synthetic causal structures. Our experiments show that RepLIn is scalable with the number of nodes in the causal graph and is suitable to improve robustness against interventional distribution shifts of both continuous and discrete latent variables compared to the ERM baselines.

因果学习鲁棒性表示学习干预

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