arXiv:2511.06790cs.LGcs.AI2025-11AAAI被引 1

在不完美先验下仍能稳定发现因果关系,突破传统方法的局限。

Robust Causal Discovery under Imperfect Structural Constraints

  • 通过代理模型评估先验约束可信度,动态调整惩罚项。
  • 在多种噪声和模型类型下均表现稳健,有效提升发现准确率。
  • 适合数据质量差或先验知识不确定的因果推断场景。

在先验知识不完善的观测数据中进行鲁棒因果发现仍是重大挑战。现有方法通常假设先验完全正确,或仅能处理特定已知错误类型,当面对未知位置与类型的错误约束时性能显著下降。这主要源于其依赖僵化且有偏的阈值策略,易与数据分布冲突。为此,我们提出通过先验对齐与冲突化解来调和知识与数据。首先,利用代理模型评估不完美结构约束的可信度,进而引导稀疏惩罚项,度量学习得到的邻接矩阵与约束邻接矩阵间的损失。理论上证明,在理想条件下,知识驱动目标与数据驱动目标一致。进一步,为解决该假设不成立时的冲突,引入多任务学习框架,通过多梯度下降联合优化双目标。所提方法在线性与非线性设定下均具鲁棒性。大量实验在不同噪声条件与结构方程模型类型下验证了其有效性与高效性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Robust causal discovery from observational data under imperfect prior knowledge remains a significant and largely unresolved challenge. Existing methods typically presuppose perfect priors or can only handle specific, pre-identified error types. And their performance degrades substantially when confronted with flawed constraints of unknown location and type. This decline arises because most of them rely on inflexible and biased thresholding strategies that may conflict with the data distribution. To overcome these limitations, we propose to harmonizes knowledge and data through prior alignment and conflict resolution. First, we assess the credibility of imperfect structural constraints through a surrogate model, which then guides a sparse penalization term measuring the loss between the learned and constrained adjacency matrices. We theoretically prove that, under ideal assumption, the knowledge-driven objective aligns with the data-driven objective. Furthermore, to resolve conflicts when this assumption is violated, we introduce a multi-task learning framework optimized via multi-gradient descent, jointly minimizing both objectives. Our proposed method is robust to both linear and nonlinear settings. Extensive experiments, conducted under diverse noise conditions and structural equation model types, demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method under imperfect structural constraints.

因果发现鲁棒性先验约束

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