Diverse Dictionary Learning

Yujia Zheng, Zijian Li, Shunxing Fan, Andrew Gordon Wilson, Kun Zhang

Keywords: Dictionary Learning, Identifiability Theory, Mechanistic Interpretability, Representation Learning

TL;DR: For general latent variable models, what remains recoverable with guarantees, and what inductive biases are universally helpful?

Abstract: Given only observational data $X = g(Z)$, where both the latent variables $Z$ and the generating process $g$ are unknown, recovering $Z$ is ill-posed without additional assumptions. Existing methods often assume linearity or rely on auxiliary supervision and functional constraints. However, such assumptions are rarely verifiable in practice, and most theoretical guarantees break down under even mild violations, leaving uncertainty about how to reliably understand the hidden world. To make identifiability *actionable* in the real-world scenarios, we take a complementary view: in the general settings where full identifiability is unattainable, *what can still be recovered with guarantees*, and *what biases could be universally adopted*? We introduce the problem of *diverse dictionary learning* to formalize this view. Specifically, we show that intersections, complements, and symmetric differences of latent variables linked to arbitrary observations, along with the latent-to-observed dependency structure, are still identifiable up to appropriate indeterminacies even without strong assumptions. These set-theoretic results can be composed using set algebra to construct structured and essential views of the hidden world, such as *genus-differentia* definitions. When sufficient structural diversity is present, they further imply full identifiability of all latent variables. Notably, all identifiability benefits follow from a simple inductive bias during estimation that can be readily integrated into most models. We validate the theory and demonstrate the benefits of the bias on both synthetic and real-world data.

Submission Number: 38