Efficiently Disentangle Causal Representations

Yuanpeng Li, Joel Hestness, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Liang Zhao, Kenneth Church

Keywords: causal representation learning

Abstract:

This paper proposes an efficient approach to learning disentangled representations with causal mechanisms based on the difference of conditional probabilities in original and new distributions.
We approximate the difference with models' generalization abilities so that it fits in the standard machine learning framework and can be computed efficiently.
In contrast to the state-of-the-art approach, which relies on the learner's adaptation speed to new distribution, the proposed approach only requires evaluating the model's generalization ability.
We provide a theoretical explanation for the advantage of the proposed method, and our experiments show that the proposed technique is 1.9--11.0$\times$ more sample efficient and 9.4--32.4$\times$ quicker than the previous method on various tasks.

Track Confirmation: Yes, I am submitting to the proceeding track.

Submission Number: 9