Diffusion Based Causal Representation Learning
On the map: LLM reasoning → Causal reasoning in LLMs
Abstract (arXiv)
Causal reasoning can be considered a cornerstone of intelligent systems. Having access to an underlying causal graph comes with the promise of cause-effect estimation and the identification of efficient and safe interventions. However, learning causal representations remains a major challenge, due to the complexity of many real-world systems. Previous works on causal representation learning have mostly focused on Variational Auto-Encoders (VAE). These methods only provide representations from a point estimate, and they are unsuitable to handle high dimensions. To overcome these problems, we proposed a new Diffusion-based Causal Representation Learning (DCRL) algorithm. This algorithm uses diffusion-based representations for causal discovery. DCRL offers access to infinite dimensional latent codes, which encode different levels of information in the latent code. In a first proof of principle, we investigate the use of DCRL for causal representation learning. We further demonstrate experimentally that this approach performs comparably well in identifying the causal structure and causal variables.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Causal reasoning in LLMs, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 41 of its 57 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Nov 2023.
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41 of 57 references.
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- 2023Diffusion Model in Causal Inference with Unmeasured Confounders
- 2026CausalGDP: Causality-Guided Diffusion Policies for Reinforcement Learning
- 2026Smoothing the Landscape: Causal Structure Learning via Diffusion Denoising Objectives
- 2026CausalSteward: An Agentic Divide-Conquer-Combine Copilot for Causal Discovery