Exploratory Causal Inference in SAEnce
Abstract
Randomized Controlled Trials are one of the pillars of science; nevertheless, they rely on hand-crafted hypotheses and expensive analysis. Such constraints prevent causal effect estimation at scale, potentially anchoring on popular yet incomplete hypotheses. We propose to discover the unknown effects of a treatment directly from data. For this, we turn unstructured data from a trial into meaningful representations via pretrained foundation models and interpret them via a sparse autoencoder. However, discovering significant causal effects at the neural level is not trivial due to multiple-testing issues and effects entanglement. To address these challenges, we introduce Neural Effect Search, a novel recursive procedure solving both issues by progressive stratification. After assessing the robustness of our algorithm on semi-synthetic experiments, we showcase, in the context of experimental ecology, the first successful unsupervised causal effect identification on a real-world scientific trial.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2510.14073,
title = {Exploratory Causal Inference in SAEnce},
author = {Tommaso Mencattini and Riccardo Cadei and Francesco Locatello},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.14073},
year = {2026}
}