Papers › Learning Neural Causal Models with Active Interventions

Learning Neural Causal Models with Active Interventions

6 Sep 2021arXiv:2109.02429archive 2025-07-28

Nino Scherrer, Olexa Bilaniuk, Yashas Annadani, Anirudh Goyal, Patrick Schwab, Bernhard Schölkopf, Michael C. Mozer, Yoshua Bengio, Stefan Bauer, Nan Rosemary Ke

Discovering causal structures from data is a challenging inference problem of fundamental importance in all areas of science. The appealing properties of neural networks have recently led to a surge of interest in differentiable neural network-based methods for learning causal structures from data. So far, differentiable causal discovery has focused on static datasets of observational or fixed interventional origin. In this work, we introduce an active intervention targeting (AIT) method which enables a quick identification of the underlying causal structure of the data-generating process. Our method significantly reduces the required number of interactions compared with random intervention targeting and is applicable for both discrete and continuous optimization formulations of learning the underlying directed acyclic graph (DAG) from data. We examine the proposed method across multiple frameworks in a wide range of settings and demonstrate superior performance on multiple benchmarks from simulated to real-world data.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

nke001/causal_learning_unknown_interventions officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Causal Discovery

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections