Related papers: Learning Causal Abstractions of Linear Structural …

The study of causal abstractions bridges two integral components of human intelligence: the ability to determine cause and effect, and the ability to interpret complex patterns into abstract concepts. Formally, causal abstraction frameworks…

Abstracting from a low level to a more explanatory high level of description, and ideally while preserving causal structure, is fundamental to scientific practice, to causal inference problems, and to robust, efficient and interpretable AI.…

Working with causal models at different levels of abstraction is an important feature of science. Existing work has already considered the problem of expressing formally the relation of abstraction between causal models. In this paper, we…

The pursuit of interpretable artificial intelligence has led to significant advancements in the development of methods that aim to explain the decision-making processes of complex models, such as deep learning systems. Among these methods,…

Causal learning has long concerned itself with the accurate recovery of underlying causal mechanisms. Such causal modelling enables better explanations of out-of-distribution data. Prior works on causal learning assume that the high-level…

An abstraction can be used to relate two structural causal models representing the same system at different levels of resolution. Learning abstractions which guarantee consistency with respect to interventional distributions would allow one…

Structural causal models provide a formalism to express causal relations between variables of interest. Models and variables can represent a system at different levels of abstraction, whereby relations may be coarsened and refined according…

The abilities of humans to understand the world in terms of cause and effect relationships, as well as to compress information into abstract concepts, are two hallmark features of human intelligence. These two topics have been studied in…

Causal abstraction is a promising theoretical framework for explainable artificial intelligence that defines when an interpretable high-level causal model is a faithful simplification of a low-level deep learning system. However, existing…

Structural causal models (SCMs) allow us to investigate complex systems at multiple levels of resolution. The causal abstraction (CA) framework formalizes the mapping between high- and low-level SCMs. We address CA learning in a challenging…

The concept of causal abstraction got recently popularised to demystify the opaque decision-making processes of machine learning models; in short, a neural network can be abstracted as a higher-level algorithm if there exists a function…

We present a categorical framework for relating causal models that represent the same system at different levels of abstraction. We define a causal abstraction as natural transformations between appropriate Markov functors, which concisely…

Causal artificial intelligence aims to enhance explainability, trustworthiness, and robustness in AI by leveraging structural causal models (SCMs). In this pursuit, recent advances formalize network sheaves and cosheaves of causal…

Structural analysis methods (e.g., probing and feature attribution) are increasingly important tools for neural network analysis. We propose a new structural analysis method grounded in a formal theory of causal abstraction that provides…

Causal abstraction provides a theoretical foundation for mechanistic interpretability, the field concerned with providing intelligible algorithms that are faithful simplifications of the known, but opaque low-level details of black box AI…

Structural causal models (SCMs) are a widespread formalism to deal with causal systems. A recent direction of research has considered the problem of relating formally SCMs at different levels of abstraction, by defining maps between SCMs…

Explanations of cognitive behavior often appeal to computations over representations. What does it take for a system to implement a given computation over suitable representational vehicles within that system? We argue that the language of…

Abstractions of causal models allow for the coarsening of models such that relations of cause and effect are preserved. Whereas abstractions focus on the relation between two models, in this paper we study a framework for causal embeddings…

Identifying the effect of a treatment from observational data typically requires assuming a fully specified causal diagram. However, such diagrams are rarely known in practice, especially in complex or high-dimensional settings. To overcome…

Neural networks are hypothesized to implement interpretable causal mechanisms, yet verifying this requires finding a causal abstraction -- a simpler, high-level Structural Causal Model (SCM) faithful to the network under interventions.…