Learning Counterfactually Invariant Predictors

Francesco Quinzan, Cecilia Casolo, Krikamol Muandet, Niki Kilbertus, Yucen Luo

Keywords: causality, kernel mean embeddings, counterfactual fairness, counterfactual invariance

TL;DR: We propose a new technique to train predictors that are counterfactually invariant, i.e., robust to interventions on specified covariates.

Abstract: We propose a method to learn predictors that are invariant under counterfactual changes of certain covariates. This method is useful when the prediction target is causally influenced by covariates that should not affect the predictor output. For instance, this could prevent an object recognition model from being influenced by position, orientation, or scale of the object itself. We propose a model-agnostic regularization term based on conditional kernel mean embeddings to enforce counterfactual invariance during training. We prove the soundness of our method, which can handle mixed categorical and continuous multivariate attributes. Empirical results on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the efficacy of our method in a variety of settings.

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Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/learning-counterfactually-invariant/code)