# Representation Disentaglement via Regularization by Causal Identification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.00128 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00128/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [Challenging Common Assumptions in the Unsupervised Learning of Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12359/) (2018)
- [Robustness May Be at Odds with Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12152/) (2018)
- [Recognition in Terra Incognita](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04975/) (2018)
- [Disentangling by Factorising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05983/) (2018)
- [Causal inference using invariant prediction: identification and confidence intervals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.01332/) (2015)
- [Variational Autoencoders and Nonlinear ICA: A Unifying Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04809/) (2019)
- [Underspecification Presents Challenges for Credibility in Modern Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03395/) (2020)
- [Towards a Definition of Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02230/) (2018)
- [Gradient Starvation: A Learning Proclivity in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09468/) (2020)
- [Variational Inference of Disentangled Latent Concepts from Unlabeled Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00848/) (2017)
- [Weakly-Supervised Disentanglement Without Compromises](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02886/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning via Invariant Causal Mechanisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07922/) (2020)
- [Robustly Disentangled Causal Mechanisms: Validating Deep Representations for Interventional Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00007/) (2018)
- [Multi-Level Variational Autoencoder: Learning Disentangled Representations from Grouped Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08841/) (2017)
- [Are Disentangled Representations Helpful for Abstract Visual Reasoning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12506/) (2019)
- [On the Transfer of Inductive Bias from Simulation to the Real World: a New Disentanglement Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03292/) (2019)
- [On Disentangled Representations Learned From Correlated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07886/) (2020)
- [Weakly Supervised Disentanglement with Guarantees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09772/) (2019)
- [Causal Networks: Semantics and Expressiveness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1304.2379/) (2013)
- [Disentanglement of Correlated Factors via Hausdorff Factorized Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07347/) (2022)
- [DisDiff: Unsupervised Disentanglement of Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13721/) (2023)
- [Causal Transportability for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12363/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we propose the use of a causal collider structured model to describe the underlying data generative process assumptions in disentangled representation learning. This extends the conventional i.i.d. factorization assumption model p(y) = prodi p(yi ), inadequate to handle learning from biased datasets (e.g., with sampling selection bias). The collider structure, explains that conditional dependencies between the underlying generating variables may be exist, even when these are in reality unrelated, complicating disentanglement. Under the rubric of causal inference, we show this issue can be reconciled under the condition of causal identification; attainable from data and a combination of constraints, aimed at controlling the dependencies characteristic of the textitcollider model. For this, we propose regularization by identification (ReI), a modular regularization engine designed to align the behavior of large scale generative models with the disentanglement constraints imposed by causal identification. Empirical evidence on standard benchmarks demonstrates the superiority of ReI in learning disentangled representations in a variational framework. In a real-world dataset we additionally show that our framework, results in interpretable representations robust to out-of-distribution examples and that align with the true expected effect from domain knowledge.