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Causal Representation Learning with Optimal Compression under Complex Treatments

arXiv cs.LG / 3/13/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper derives a novel multi-treatment generalization bound for estimating Individual Treatment Effects (ITE) and proposes an estimator for the optimal balancing weight α that eliminates expensive heuristic tuning.
  • It analyzes three balancing strategies—Pairwise, One-vs-All (OVA), and Treatment Aggregation—with OVA excelling in low-dimensional settings and Treatment Aggregation achieving O(1) scalability in large treatment spaces.
  • The framework extends to a generative architecture, Multi-Treatment CausalEGM, preserving the Wasserstein geodesic structure of the treatment manifold.
  • Experiments on semi-synthetic and image datasets demonstrate improved estimation accuracy and efficiency, particularly for large-scale intervention scenarios.
  • The work blends theory and practice to advance causal representation learning under complex treatment regimes, with implications for scalable causal inference.

Abstract

Estimating Individual Treatment Effects (ITE) in multi-treatment scenarios faces two critical challenges: the Hyperparameter Selection Dilemma for balancing weights and the Curse of Dimensionality in computational scalability. This paper derives a novel multi-treatment generalization bound and proposes a theoretical estimator for the optimal balancing weight \alpha, eliminating expensive heuristic tuning. We investigate three balancing strategies: Pairwise, One-vs-All (OVA), and Treatment Aggregation. While OVA achieves superior precision in low-dimensional settings, our proposed Treatment Aggregation ensures both accuracy and O(1) scalability as the treatment space expands. Furthermore, we extend our framework to a generative architecture, Multi-Treatment CausalEGM, which preserves the Wasserstein geodesic structure of the treatment manifold. Experiments on semi-synthetic and image datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms traditional models in estimation accuracy and efficiency, particularly in large-scale intervention scenarios.