{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/interventional-causal-representation-learning","title":"Interventional Causal Representation Learning","arxiv_id":"2209.11924","date":"2022-09-24","proceeding":null,"authors":["Kartik Ahuja","Divyat Mahajan","Yixin Wang","Yoshua Bengio"],"abstract":"Causal representation learning seeks to extract high-level latent factors from low-level sensory data. Most existing methods rely on observational data and structural assumptions (e.g., conditional independence) to identify the latent factors. However, interventional data is prevalent across applications. Can interventional data facilitate causal representation learning? We explore this question in this paper. The key observation is that interventional data often carries geometric signatures of the latent factors' support (i.e. what values each latent can possibly take). For example, when the latent factors are causally connected, interventions can break the dependency between the intervened latents' support and their ancestors'. Leveraging this fact, we prove that the latent causal factors can be identified up to permutation and scaling given data from perfect $do$ interventions. Moreover, we can achieve block affine identification, namely the estimated latent factors are only entangled with a few other latents if we have access to data from imperfect interventions. These results highlight the unique power of interventional data in causal representation learning; they can enable provable identification of latent factors without any assumptions about their distributions or dependency structure.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.11924v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.11924v4.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"interventional-causal-representation-learning","repo_url":"https://github.com/facebookresearch/causalrepid","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"representation-learning","task_name":"Representation Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2209.11924","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2209.11924"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/facebookresearch/causalrepid","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"summary":{"unverified":2},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":2,"ran":0,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":2,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"b8fb66a08a6df225","entry":"IOSS","repo":"facebookresearch/causalrepid","repo_kind":"official","path":"algorithms/ioss_auto_encoder.py","file_url":"https://github.com/facebookresearch/causalrepid/blob/HEAD/algorithms/ioss_auto_encoder.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"b8fb66a08a6df225"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"28269a22b2e230e2","entry":"build_grid","repo":"facebookresearch/causalrepid","repo_kind":"official","path":"models/image_slot_attention_decoder.py","file_url":"https://github.com/facebookresearch/causalrepid/blob/HEAD/models/image_slot_attention_decoder.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"28269a22b2e230e2"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}