Learning Linear Causal Representations from General Environments: Identifiability and Intrinsic Ambiguity

Abstract

We study causal representation learning, the task of recovering high-level latent variables and their causal relationships in the form of a causal graph from low-level observed data (such as text and images), assuming access to observations generated from multiple environments. Prior results on the identifiability of causal representations typically assume access to single-node interventions which is rather unrealistic in practice, since the latent variables are unknown in the first place. In this work, we consider the task of learning causal representation learning with data collected from general environments . We show that even when the causal model and the mixing function are both linear, there exists a surrounded-node ambiguity (SNA) [46] which is basically unavoidable in our setting. On the other hand, in the same linear case, we show that identification up to SNA is possible under mild conditions, and propose an algorithm, LiNGCReL which provably achieves such identifiability guarantee. We conduct extensive experiments on synthetic data and demonstrate the effectiveness of LiNGCReL in the finite-sample regime.