用层叠理论构建多主体因果认知网络,实现不一致视角下的统一推理。
Networks of Causal Abstractions: A Sheaf-theoretic Framework
- 基于层叠理论构建因果抽象网络,无需全局图或联合数据
- 证明了全局因果解存在的充要条件,与连接拉普拉斯谱相关
- 适用于金融交易等多智能体系统,支持反事实分析与优化
因果人工智能的核心挑战在于如何协调多个分布式主体因环境感知有限且异构而产生的不完整、主观的因果观点。现有框架通常假设存在单一共享的全局因果模型,但对多视角协调缺乏形式化处理。本文提出因果抽象网络(CAN),一种基于层叠理论的通用框架,用于表示、学习和推理混合因果模型(MCMs)集合——该类模型统一了多种上下文依赖的因果机制。层叠理论提供了自然基础,可在不依赖显式因果图、函数机制、干预数据或联合观测的情况下,一致地对齐分散的因果知识。理论上,我们给出了MCM的范畴化表述,并刻画了CAN的关键性质,包括一致性与平滑性。在一致性条件下,建立了全局截面存在的充要条件:(i) 与关联连接拉普拉斯的谱特性相关;(ii) 因果知识扩散在CAN上收敛至全局截面空间。方法上,利用因果抽象的可组合性,将一致CAN的学习分解为网络边上的局部问题,将先前针对高斯变量的工作扩展至高斯混合模型,提出MIXTURE-CALSEP算法。在合成数据及涉及多智能体交易系统的金融应用中验证了框架的有效性,展示了CAN恢复、基于CAN的投资组合优化与反事实推理能力。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
A core challenge in causal artificial intelligence is the principled coordination of multiple, imperfect, and subjective causal perspectives arising from distributed agents with limited and heterogeneous access to the environment. This problem has received little formal treatment, as the existing framework assumes a single shared global causal model. This work introduces the causal abstraction network (CAN), a general sheaf-theoretic framework for representing, learning, and reasoning across collections of mixture of causal models (MCMs) - a class that unifies several existing models of context-dependent causal mechanisms. Sheaf theory provides a natural foundation for this task, offering a rigorous framework to coherently align distributed causal knowledge without requiring explicit causal graphs, functional mechanisms, interventional data, or jointly sampled observations. At the theoretical level, we provide a categorical formulation of MCMs and characterize key properties of CANs, including consistency and smoothness. Under consistency, we establish necessary and sufficient conditions: (i) for the existence of global sections, linked to spectral properties of an associated connection Laplacian; and (ii) for the convergence of causal knowledge diffusion over the CAN to the space of global sections. At the methodological level, we exploit the compositionality of causal abstractions to decompose the learning of consistent CANs into local problems on network edges, extending our prior work on Gaussian variables to Gaussian mixtures via the proposed MIXTURE-CALSEP algorithm. We validate the framework on synthetic data and through a financial application involving a multi-agent trading system, demonstrating CAN recovery, CAN-based portfolio optimization, and counterfactual reasoning.
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