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Related papers: Causal Abstractions, Categorically Unified

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Directed acyclic graphical (DAG) models are a powerful tool for representing causal relationships among jointly distributed random variables, especially concerning data from across different experimental settings. However, it is not always…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-03 Francisco Madaleno , Pratik Misra , Alex Markham

This short paper discusses continually updated causal abstractions as a potential direction of future research. The key idea is to revise the existing level of causal abstraction to a different level of detail that is both consistent with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Matej Zečević , Moritz Willig , Jonas Seng , Florian Peter Busch

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Denis Sutter , Julian Minder , Thomas Hofmann , Tiago Pimentel

Abstraction is a powerful idea widely used in science, to model, reason and explain the behavior of systems in a more tractable search space, by omitting irrelevant details. While notions of abstraction have matured for deterministic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-01-14 Vaishak Belle

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Gabriele D'Acunto , Paolo Di Lorenzo , Sergio Barbarossa

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Atticus Geiger , Hanson Lu , Thomas Icard , Christopher Potts

It is known that the classical framework of causal models is not general enough to allow for causal reasoning about quantum systems. While the framework has been generalized in a variety of different ways to the quantum case, much of this…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2020-11-23 Jonathan Barrett , Robin Lorenz , Ognyan Oreshkov

We develop a category-theoretic criterion for determining the equivalence of causal models having different but homomorphic directed acyclic graphs over discrete variables. Following Jacobs et al. (2019), we define a causal model as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Jun Otsuka , Hayato Saigo

Inferring the causal structure that links n observables is usually based upon detecting statistical dependences and choosing simple graphs that make the joint measure Markovian. Here we argue why causal inference is also possible when only…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2008-04-24 Dominik Janzing , Bernhard Schoelkopf

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.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Amir Asiaee

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Atticus Geiger , Zhengxuan Wu , Christopher Potts , Thomas Icard , Noah D. Goodman

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Gabriele D'Acunto , Paolo Di Lorenzo , Sergio Barbarossa

We give a category-theoretic treatment of causal models that formalizes the syntax for causal reasoning over a directed acyclic graph (DAG) by associating a free Markov category with the DAG in a canonical way. This framework enables us to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-04-12 Yimu Yin , Jiji Zhang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Gabriele D'Acunto , Fabio Massimo Zennaro , Yorgos Felekis , Paolo Di Lorenzo

This note illustrates how a variety of causal abstraction arXiv:1707.00819 arXiv:1812.03789, defined here as causal abstractive simulation, can be used to formalize a simple example of language model simulation. This note considers the case…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Gabriel Simmons

We introduce a novel framework for causal explanations of stochastic, sequential decision-making systems built on the well-studied structural causal model paradigm for causal reasoning. This single framework can identify multiple,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-01-12 Samer B. Nashed , Saaduddin Mahmud , Claudia V. Goldman , Shlomo Zilberstein

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Fabio Massimo Zennaro , Paolo Turrini , Theodoros Damoulas

We propose Universal Causality, an overarching framework based on category theory that defines the universal property that underlies causal inference independent of the underlying representational formalism used. More formally, universal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-07-08 Sridhar Mahadevan

Recently there has been significant interest in using causal modelling techniques to understand the structure of physical theories. However, the notion of `causation' is limiting - insisting that a physical theory must involve causal…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2023-07-24 Mordecai Waegell , Kelvin J. McQueen , Emily C. Adlam

In the fundamental statistics course, students are taught to remember the well-known saying: "Correlation is not Causation". Till now, statistics (i.e., correlation) have developed various successful frameworks, such as Transformer and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-11-22 Ning Xu , Yifei Gao , Hongshuo Tian , Yongdong Zhang , An-An Liu