Score-informed Neural Operator for Enhancing Ordering-based Causal Discovery

Jiyeon Kang, Songseong Kim, Chanhui Lee, Doyeong Hwang, Joanie Hayoun Chung, Yunkyung Ko, Sumin Lee, Sungwoong Kim, Sungbin Lim

Keywords: Causal Discovery, Score Matching, Diffusion Models, Neural Operator

TL;DR: We enhance score matching based causal discovery algorithms through a specially designed neural operator trained via diffusion modeling in smooth function spaces.

Abstract:

Ordering-based approaches to causal discovery identify topological orders of causal graphs, providing scalable alternatives to combinatorial search methods. Under the Additive Noise Models (ANMs) assumption, recent causal ordering methods based on score matching require an accurate estimation of the Hessian diagonal of the log-densities. However, previous approaches mainly use Stein gradient estimators, which are computationally expensive and memory-intensive. Although DiffAN addresses these limitations by substituting kernel-based estimates with diffusion models, it remains numerically unstable due to the second-order derivatives of score models. To alleviate these problems, we propose Score-informed Neural Operator (SciNO), a probabilistic generative model in smooth function spaces designed to stably approximate the Hessian diagonal and to preserve structural information during the score modeling.
Empirical results show that SciNO reduces order divergence by 42.7% on synthetic graphs and by 31.5% in real-world datasets on average compared to DiffAN, while maintaining memory efficiency and scalability. Furthermore, we propose a probabilistic control algorithm for causal reasoning with autoregressive models that integrates SciNO's probability estimates with autoregressive model priors, enabling reliable data-driven causal ordering informed by semantic information. Consequently, the proposed method enhances causal reasoning abilities of LLMs without additional fine-tuning or prompt engineering.

Primary Area: Probabilistic methods (e.g., variational inference, causal inference, Gaussian processes)

Submission Number: 25173