Measure-Theoretic Anti-Causal Representation Learning
Arman Behnam, Binghui Wang
Abstract
Causal representation learning in the anti-causal setting-labels cause features rather than the reverse-presents unique challenges requiring specialized approaches. We propose Anti-Causal Invariant Abstractions (ACIA), a novel measuretheoretic framework for anti-causal representation learning. ACIA employs a twolevel design: low-level representations capture how labels generate observations, while high-level representations learn stable causal patterns across environmentspecific variations. ACIA addresses key limitations of existing approaches by:
(1) accommodating prefect and imperfect interventions through interventional kernels, (2) eliminating dependency on explicit causal structures, (3) handling high-dimensional data effectively, and (4) providing theoretical guarantees for outof-distribution generalization. Experiments on synthetic and real-world medical datasets demonstrate that ACIA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and invariance metrics. Furthermore, our theoretical results establish tight bounds on performance gaps between training and unseen environments, confirming the efficacy of our approach for robust anti-causal learning. Code is
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