# Modular Learning of Deep Causal Generative Models for High-dimensional Causal Inference

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01426 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01426/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [Interpreting the Latent Space of GANs for Semantic Face Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10786/) (2019)
- [MaskGAN: Towards Diverse and Interactive Facial Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11922/) (2019)
- [Causal Effect Inference with Deep Latent-Variable Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08821/) (2017)
- [COVID-Net: A Tailored Deep Convolutional Neural Network Design for Detection of COVID-19 Cases from Chest X-Ray Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09871/) (2020)
- [Deep Structural Causal Models for Tractable Counterfactual Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06485/) (2020)
- [Causality matters in medical imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08142/) (2019)
- [CausalGAN: Learning Causal Implicit Generative Models with Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02023/) (2017)
- [DECAF: Generating Fair Synthetic Data Using Causally-Aware Generative Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12884/) (2021)
- [The Causal-Neural Connection: Expressiveness, Learnability, and Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00793/) (2021)
- [Estimating the Effects of Continuous-valued Interventions using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12326/) (2020)
- [Treatment effect estimation with disentangled latent factors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10652/) (2020)
- [Neural Causal Models for Counterfactual Identification and Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00035/) (2022)
- [Morpho-MNIST: Quantitative Assessment and Diagnostics for Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10780/) (2018)
- [Evaluating and Mitigating Bias in Image Classifiers: A Causal Perspective Using Counterfactuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08270/) (2020)
- [High Fidelity Image Counterfactuals with Probabilistic Causal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15764/) (2023)
- [Causal Inference in Recommender Systems: A Survey and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12397/) (2022)
- [Nested Counterfactual Identification from Arbitrary Surrogate Experiments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03190/) (2021)
- [Measuring axiomatic soundness of counterfactual image models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01274/) (2023)
- [CounteRGAN: Generating Realistic Counterfactuals with Residual Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.05199/) (2020)
- [Image-based Treatment Effect Heterogeneity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06417/) (2022)
- [An Adaptive Kernel Approach to Federated Learning of Heterogeneous Causal Effects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00346/) (2023)
- [Partial Identification of Treatment Effects with Implicit Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08139/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [DeCaFlow: A deconfounding causal generative model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15114/) (2025)
- [Partial Transportability for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23605/) (2025)
- [Deep Autoregressive Models as Causal Inference Engines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18581/) (2024)
- [Conditional Generative Models are Sufficient to Sample from Any Causal Effect Estimand](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07419/) (2024)
- [DoFlow: Flow-based Generative Models for Interventional and Counterfactual Forecasting on Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02137/) (2025)
- [ACTIVA: Amortized Causal Effect Estimation via Transformer-based Variational Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01290/) (2025)
- [MCAM: Multimodal Causal Analysis Model for Ego-Vehicle-Level Driving Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06072/) (2025)
- [Uncertainty-aware Causal Decision Making via Effect Bound Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22736/) (2026)
- [Beyond Conditional Independence: Root Cause Analysis with Deep Causal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36771/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sound and complete algorithms have been proposed to compute identifiable causal queries using the causal structure and data. However, most of these algorithms assume accurate estimation of the data distribution, which is impractical for high-dimensional variables such as images. On the other hand, modern deep generative architectures can be trained to sample from high-dimensional distributions. However, training these networks are typically very costly. Thus, it is desirable to leverage pre-trained models to answer causal queries using such high-dimensional data. To address this, we propose modular training of deep causal generative models that not only makes learning more efficient, but also allows us to utilize large, pre-trained conditional generative models. To the best of our knowledge, our algorithm, Modular-DCM is the first algorithm that, given the causal structure, uses adversarial training to learn the network weights, and can make use of pre-trained models to provably sample from any identifiable causal query in the presence of latent confounders. With extensive experiments on the Colored-MNIST dataset, we demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms the baselines. We also show our algorithm's convergence on the COVIDx dataset and its utility with a causal invariant prediction problem on CelebA-HQ.