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arXiv · 2606.19594

Unsupervised Causal Abstractions Discovery

Théo Saulus·Simon Lacoste-Julien·Dhanya Sridhar
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Abstract

Causal abstractions formalize when a high-level structural causal model (SCM) captures the interventional behavior of a lower-level SCM. Existing applications of this notion largely follow a hypothesis-testing paradigm: an expert proposes a candidate high-level model and then evaluates if the low-level system implements it. We study the complementary problem of learning a high-level model directly from low-level measurements. Our contributions leverage hypotheses from low-rank causal discovery, and can be summarized as follows: (1) we show that observations generated by a low-rank graph induce latents that form a causal abstraction, (2) we provide identifiability results about these latents, and (3) we propose a practical objective to learn this high-level SCM.

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Théo Saulus, Simon Lacoste-Julien, Dhanya Sridhar. 2026-06-17. Unsupervised Causal Abstractions Discovery. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.19594

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