Causal Variational Deep Embedding: A Family of Interventional Generators for Confounded Images

Jingyuan Chen; Kangrui Ruan; Junzhe Zhang

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arXiv · 2606.21806

Causal Variational Deep Embedding: A Family of Interventional Generators for Confounded Images

Jingyuan Chen·Kangrui Ruan·Junzhe Zhang

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Abstract

Deep generative models reproduce the observational distribution of their training data, inheriting any spurious associations it contains. A common source is an unobserved confounder that shapes both an attribute the user wants to control at sampling time and an attribute expected to vary in response. Existing causal generative approaches resolve the resulting ambiguity by imposing structural assumptions strong enough to single out one interventional distribution; in image domains, such assumptions are rarely warranted, and the data is generally consistent with a set of distinct causal mechanisms -- a feasible region of interventional distributions. We propose CauVaDE (Causal Variational Deep Embedding), built on a canonical augmented SCM in which the unobserved confounder collapses, without loss of generality, into a discrete latent cluster of bounded support while continuous variation is absorbed into independent noises. We prove that this canonical class is dense, in both observational and interventional Wasserstein distance, in the class of augmented SCMs compatible with a given causal diagram, and instantiate it as a mixture variational autoencoder whose cluster variable plays the role of the canonical confounder. An entropy regularizer with weight $γ$ on the cluster posterior then traces a family of candidate causal effects that fit the observational data to comparable likelihood while spanning the feasible region. Experiments on image data benchmarks show that CauVaDE produces diverse interventional samples and improves FID against an unconfounded reference.

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BibTeX RIS

Jingyuan Chen, Kangrui Ruan, Junzhe Zhang. 2026-08-10. Causal Variational Deep Embedding: A Family of Interventional Generators for Confounded Images. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21806

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