English

Causal Future Prediction in a Minkowski Space-Time

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2020-09-01 v2 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Estimating future events is a difficult task. Unlike humans, machine learning approaches are not regularized by a natural understanding of physics. In the wild, a plausible succession of events is governed by the rules of causality, which cannot easily be derived from a finite training set. In this paper we propose a novel theoretical framework to perform causal future prediction by embedding spatiotemporal information on a Minkowski space-time. We utilize the concept of a light cone from special relativity to restrict and traverse the latent space of an arbitrary model. We demonstrate successful applications in causal image synthesis and future video frame prediction on a dataset of images. Our framework is architecture- and task-independent and comes with strong theoretical guarantees of causal capabilities.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2008.09154,
  title  = {Causal Future Prediction in a Minkowski Space-Time},
  author = {Athanasios Vlontzos and Henrique Bergallo Rocha and Daniel Rueckert and Bernhard Kainz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.09154},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

Includes supplement

R2 v1 2026-06-23T18:00:00.488Z