通过跨任务因果不变性,从市民报告中更准重建城市事件。
Multi-Task Anti-Causal Learning for Reconstructing Urban Events from Residents' Reports
- 构建共享因果图与多任务结构方程模型,分离共性与任务特异性机制。
- 在曼哈顿和纽瓦克数据上,相比基线最高降低34.61%的平均绝对误差。
- 适合处理多源城市事件重建,尤其对数据稀疏场景有强泛化能力。
许多现实中的机器学习任务属于反因果问题:需从可观测结果反推潜在原因。实践中常面临多个相关任务,其中部分前向因果机制在任务间保持不变,而其他部分则因任务而异。本文提出多任务反因果学习(MTAC)框架,通过显式利用跨任务不变性,从结果和混杂因素中估计原因。MTAC首先进行因果发现以学习共享因果图,随后构建结构化多任务结构方程模型(SEM),将结果生成过程分解为(i)任务不变机制与(ii)任务特异性机制,通过共享主干+任务专用头实现。基于学习到的前向模型,MTAC采用最大后验(MAP)推理联合优化潜在机制变量与原因强度,以重构原因。我们在市民报告重建城市事件的应用中评估了该方法,涵盖三类任务:停车违规、废弃房产与卫生不良。在曼哈顿与纽瓦克的真实数据上,MTAC持续优于强基线,最高实现34.61%的平均绝对误差(MAE)降低,验证了跨任务可迁移因果机制的优势。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Many real-world machine learning tasks are anti-causal: they require inferring latent causes from observed effects. In practice, we often face multiple related tasks where part of the forward causal mechanism is invariant across tasks, while other components are task-specific. We propose Multi-Task Anti-Causal learning (MTAC), a framework for estimating causes from outcomes and confounders by explicitly exploiting such cross-task invariances. MTAC first performs causal discovery to learn a shared causal graph and then instantiates a structured multi-task structural equation model (SEM) that factorizes the outcome-generation process into (i) a task-invariant mechanism and (ii) task-specific mechanisms via a shared backbone with task-specific heads. Building on the learned forward model, MTAC performs maximum A posteriori (MAP)based inference to reconstruct causes by jointly optimizing latent mechanism variables and cause magnitudes under the learned causal structure. We evaluate MTAC on the application of urban event reconstruction from resident reports, spanning three tasks:parking violations, abandoned properties, and unsanitary conditions. On real-world data collected from Manhattan and the city of Newark, MTAC consistently improves reconstruction accuracy over strong baselines, achieving up to 34.61\% MAE reduction and demonstrating the benefit of learning transferable causal mechanisms across tasks.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。