Shengyu Zhu

Yong Lin, Shengyu Zhu, Lu Tan et al.

It is commonplace to encounter heterogeneous data, of which some aspects of the data distribution may vary but the underlying causal mechanisms remain constant. When data are divided into distinct environments according to the heterogeneity, recent invariant learning methods have proposed to learn robust and invariant models based on this environment partition. It is hence tempting to utilize the inherent heterogeneity even when environment partition is not provided. Unfortunately, in this work, we show that learning invariant features under this circumstance is fundamentally impossible without further inductive biases or additional information. Then, we propose a framework to jointly learn environment partition and invariant representation, assisted by additional auxiliary information. We derive sufficient and necessary conditions for our framework to provably identify invariant features under a fairly general setting. Experimental results on both synthetic and real world datasets validate our analysis and demonstrate an improved performance of the proposed framework over existing methods. Finally, our results also raise the need of making the role of inductive biases more explicit in future works, when considering learning invariant models without environment partition. Codes are available at https://github.com/linyongver/ZIN_official .

Shengyu Zhu, Biao Chen

This paper develops efficient algorithms for distributed average consensus with quantized communication using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). We first study the effects of probabilistic and deterministic quantizations on a distributed ADMM algorithm. With probabilistic quantization, this algorithm yields linear convergence to the desired average in the mean sense with a bounded variance. When deterministic quantization is employed, the distributed ADMM either converges to a consensus or cycles with a finite period after a finite-time iteration. In the cyclic case, local quantized variables have the same mean over one period and hence each node can also reach a consensus. We then obtain an upper bound on the consensus error which depends only on the quantization resolution and the average degree of the network. Finally, we propose a two-stage algorithm which combines both probabilistic and deterministic quantizations. Simulations show that the two-stage algorithm, without picking small algorithm parameter, has consensus errors that are typically less than one quantization resolution for all connected networks where agents' data can be of arbitrary magnitudes.

Ruoyu Wang, Mingyang Yi, Zhitang Chen et al.

In real-world applications, it is important and desirable to learn a model that performs well on out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Recently, causality has become a powerful tool to tackle the OOD generalization problem, with the idea resting on the causal mechanism that is invariant across domains of interest. To leverage the generally unknown causal mechanism, existing works assume a linear form of causal feature or require sufficiently many and diverse training domains, which are usually restrictive in practice. In this work, we obviate these assumptions and tackle the OOD problem without explicitly recovering the causal feature. Our approach is based on transformations that modify the non-causal feature but leave the causal part unchanged, which can be either obtained from prior knowledge or learned from the training data in the multi-domain scenario. Under the setting of invariant causal mechanism, we theoretically show that if all such transformations are available, then we can learn a minimax optimal model across the domains using only single domain data. Noticing that knowing a complete set of these causal invariant transformations may be impractical, we further show that it suffices to know only a subset of these transformations. Based on the theoretical findings, a regularized training procedure is proposed to improve the OOD generalization capability. Extensive experimental results on both synthetic and real datasets verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, even with only a few causal invariant transformations.

Wenqian Li, Yinchuan Li, Shengyu Zhu et al.

Causal discovery aims to uncover causal structure among a set of variables. Score-based approaches mainly focus on searching for the best Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) based on a predefined score function. However, most of them are not applicable on a large scale due to the limited searchability. Inspired by the active learning in generative flow networks, we propose a novel approach to learning a DAG from observational data called GFlowCausal. It converts the graph search problem to a generation problem, in which direct edges are added gradually. GFlowCausal aims to learn the best policy to generate high-reward DAGs by sequential actions with probabilities proportional to predefined rewards. We propose a plug-and-play module based on transitive closure to ensure efficient sampling. Theoretical analysis shows that this module could guarantee acyclicity properties effectively and the consistency between final states and fully-connected graphs. We conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic and real datasets, and results show the proposed approach to be superior and also performs well in a large-scale setting.

Xinwei Shen, Shengyu Zhu, Jiji Zhang et al.

In a nonparametric setting, the causal structure is often identifiable only up to Markov equivalence, and for the purpose of causal inference, it is useful to learn a graphical representation of the Markov equivalence class (MEC). In this paper, we revisit the Greedy Equivalence Search (GES) algorithm, which is widely cited as a score-based algorithm for learning the MEC of the underlying causal structure. We observe that in order to make the GES algorithm consistent in a nonparametric setting, it is not necessary to design a scoring metric that evaluates graphs. Instead, it suffices to plug in a consistent estimator of a measure of conditional dependence to guide the search. We therefore present a reframing of the GES algorithm, which is more flexible than the standard score-based version and readily lends itself to the nonparametric setting with a general measure of conditional dependence. In addition, we propose a neural conditional dependence (NCD) measure, which utilizes the expressive power of deep neural networks to characterize conditional independence in a nonparametric manner. We establish the optimality of the reframed GES algorithm under standard assumptions and the consistency of using our NCD estimator to decide conditional independence. Together these results justify the proposed approach. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in causal discovery, as well as the advantages of using our NCD measure over kernel-based measures.

Keli Zhang, Shengyu Zhu, Marcus Kalander et al.

$\texttt{gCastle}$ is an end-to-end Python toolbox for causal structure learning. It provides functionalities of generating data from either simulator or real-world dataset, learning causal structure from the data, and evaluating the learned graph, together with useful practices such as prior knowledge insertion, preliminary neighborhood selection, and post-processing to remove false discoveries. Compared with related packages, $\texttt{gCastle}$ includes many recently developed gradient-based causal discovery methods with optional GPU acceleration. $\texttt{gCastle}$ brings convenience to researchers who may directly experiment with the code as well as practitioners with graphical user interference. Three real-world datasets in telecommunications are also provided in the current version. $\texttt{gCastle}$ is available under Apache License 2.0 at \url{https://github.com/huawei-noah/trustworthyAI/tree/master/gcastle}.

Shengyu Zhu, Congyi Fan, Fuxuan Zhang

Image restoration is a fundamental and challenging task in computer vision, where CNN-based frameworks demonstrate significant computational efficiency. However, previous CNN-based methods often face challenges in adequately restoring fine texture details, which are limited by the small receptive field of CNN structures and the lack of channel feature modeling. In this paper, we propose WaMaIR, which is a novel framework with a large receptive field for image perception and improves the reconstruction of texture details in restored images. Specifically, we introduce the Global Multiscale Wavelet Transform Convolutions (GMWTConvs) for expandding the receptive field to extract image features, preserving and enriching texture features in model inputs. Meanwhile, we propose the Mamba-Based Channel-Aware Module (MCAM), explicitly designed to capture long-range dependencies within feature channels, which enhancing the model sensitivity to color, edges, and texture information. Additionally, we propose Multiscale Texture Enhancement Loss (MTELoss) for image restoration to guide the model in preserving detailed texture structures effectively. Extensive experiments confirm that WaMaIR outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving better image restoration and efficient computational performance of the model.

Xuekang Wang, Shengyu Zhu, Xueqi Cheng

Despite extensive efforts to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values and safety rules, jailbreak attacks that exploit certain vulnerabilities continuously emerge, highlighting the need to strengthen existing LLMs with additional safety properties to defend against these attacks. However, tuning large models has become increasingly resource intensive and may have difficulty ensuring consistent performance. We introduce Speculative Safety-Aware Decoding (SSD), a lightweight decoding-time approach that equips LLMs with the desired safety property while accelerating inference. We assume that there exists a small language model that possesses this desired property. SSD integrates speculative sampling during decoding and leverages the match ratio between the small and composite models to quantify jailbreak risks. This enables SSD to dynamically switch between decoding schemes to prioritize utility or safety, to handle the challenge of different model capacities. The output token is then sampled from a new distribution that combines the distributions of the original and the small models. Experimental results show that SSD successfully equips the large model with the desired safety property, and also allows the model to remain helpful to benign queries. Furthermore, SSD accelerates the inference time, thanks to the speculative sampling design.

Tongrui Su, Qingbin Li, Shengyu Zhu et al.

We study the problem of transfer-based black-box attack, where adversarial samples generated using a single surrogate model are directly applied to target models. Compared with untargeted attacks, existing methods still have lower Attack Success Rates (ASRs) in the targeted setting, i.e., the obtained adversarial examples often overfit the surrogate model but fail to mislead other models. In this paper, we hypothesize that the pixels or features in these adversarial examples collaborate in a highly dependent manner to maximize the success of an adversarial attack on the surrogate model, which we refer to as perturbation co-adaptation. Then, we propose to Mitigate perturbation Co-adaptation by DropConnect (MCD) to enhance transferability, by creating diverse variants of surrogate model at each optimization iteration. We conduct extensive experiments across various CNN- and Transformer-based models to demonstrate the effectiveness of MCD. In the challenging scenario of transferring from a CNN-based model to Transformer-based models, MCD achieves 13% higher average ASRs compared with state-of-the-art baselines. MCD boosts the performance of self-ensemble methods by bringing in more diversification across the variants while reserving sufficient semantic information for each variant. In addition, MCD attains the highest performance gain when scaling the compute of crafting adversarial examples.

Tim Tse, Zhitang Chen, Shengyu Zhu et al.

The discovery of causal relationships in a set of random variables is a fundamental objective of science and has also recently been argued as being an essential component towards real machine intelligence. One class of causal discovery techniques are founded based on the argument that there are inherent structural asymmetries between the causal and anti-causal direction which could be leveraged in determining the direction of causation. To go about capturing these discrepancies between cause and effect remains to be a challenge and many current state-of-the-art algorithms propose to compare the norms of the kernel mean embeddings of the conditional distributions. In this work, we argue that such approaches based on RKHS embeddings are insufficient in capturing principal markers of cause-effect asymmetry involving higher-order structural variabilities of the conditional distributions. We propose Kernel Intrinsic Invariance Measure with Heterogeneous Transform (KIIM-HT) which introduces a novel score measure based on heterogeneous transformation of RKHS embeddings to extract relevant higher-order moments of the conditional densities for causal discovery. Inference is made via comparing the score of each hypothetical cause-effect direction. Tests and comparisons on a synthetic dataset, a two-dimensional synthetic dataset and the real-world benchmark dataset Tübingen Cause-Effect Pairs verify our approach. In addition, we conduct a sensitivity analysis to the regularization parameter to faithfully compare previous work to our method and an experiment with trials on varied hyperparameter values to showcase the robustness of our algorithm.

Yan Lyu, Sunhao Dai, Peng Wu et al.

Accurate recommendation and reliable explanation are two key issues for modern recommender systems. However, most recommendation benchmarks only concern the prediction of user-item ratings while omitting the underlying causes behind the ratings. For example, the widely-used Yahoo!R3 dataset contains little information on the causes of the user-movie ratings. A solution could be to conduct surveys and require the users to provide such information. In practice, the user surveys can hardly avoid compliance issues and sparse user responses, which greatly hinders the exploration of causality-based recommendation. To better support the studies of causal inference and further explanations in recommender systems, we propose a novel semi-synthetic data generation framework for recommender systems where causal graphical models with missingness are employed to describe the causal mechanism of practical recommendation scenarios. To illustrate the use of our framework, we construct a semi-synthetic dataset with Causal Tags And Ratings (CTAR), based on the movies as well as their descriptive tags and rating information collected from a famous movie rating website. Using the collected data and the causal graph, the user-item-ratings and their corresponding user-item-tags are automatically generated, which provides the reasons (selected tags) why the user rates the items. Descriptive statistics and baseline results regarding the CTAR dataset are also reported. The proposed data generation framework is not limited to recommendation, and the released APIs can be used to generate customized datasets for other research tasks.

Junlong Lyu, Zhitang Chen, Chang Feng et al.

Invertible neural networks based on Coupling Flows CFlows) have various applications such as image synthesis and data compression. The approximation universality for CFlows is of paramount importance to ensure the model expressiveness. In this paper, we prove that CFlows can approximate any diffeomorphism in C^k-norm if its layers can approximate certain single-coordinate transforms. Specifically, we derive that a composition of affine coupling layers and invertible linear transforms achieves this universality. Furthermore, in parametric cases where the diffeomorphism depends on some extra parameters, we prove the corresponding approximation theorems for our proposed parametric coupling flows named Para-CFlows. In practice, we apply Para-CFlows as a neural surrogate model in contextual Bayesian optimization tasks, to demonstrate its superiority over other neural surrogate models in terms of optimization performance.

Xiaoqiang Wang, Yali Du, Shengyu Zhu et al.

It is a long-standing question to discover causal relations among a set of variables in many empirical sciences. Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved promising results in causal discovery from observational data. However, searching the space of directed graphs and enforcing acyclicity by implicit penalties tend to be inefficient and restrict the existing RL-based method to small scale problems. In this work, we propose a novel RL-based approach for causal discovery, by incorporating RL into the ordering-based paradigm. Specifically, we formulate the ordering search problem as a multi-step Markov decision process, implement the ordering generating process with an encoder-decoder architecture, and finally use RL to optimize the proposed model based on the reward mechanisms designed for~each ordering. A generated ordering would then be processed using variable selection to obtain the final causal graph. We analyze the consistency and computational complexity of the proposed method, and empirically show that a pretrained model can be exploited to accelerate training. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data sets shows that the proposed method achieves a much improved performance over existing RL-based method.

Zhuangyan Fang, Yue Liu, Zhi Geng et al.

Causality is important for designing interpretable and robust methods in artificial intelligence research. We propose a local approach to identify whether a variable is a cause of a given target under the framework of causal graphical models of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). In general, the causal relation between two variables may not be identifiable from observational data as many causal DAGs encoding different causal relations are Markov equivalent. In this paper, we first introduce a sufficient and necessary graphical condition to check the existence of a causal path from a variable to a target in every Markov equivalent DAG. Next, we provide local criteria for identifying whether a variable is a cause/non-cause of a target based only on the local structure instead of the entire graph. Finally, we propose a local learning algorithm for this causal query via learning the local structure of the variable and some additional statistical independence tests related to the target. Simulation studies show that our local algorithm is efficient and effective, compared with other state-of-art methods.

Zhuangyan Fang, Shengyu Zhu, Jiji Zhang et al.

Despite several advances in recent years, learning causal structures represented by directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) remains a challenging task in high dimensional settings when the graphs to be learned are not sparse. In this paper, we propose to exploit a low rank assumption regarding the (weighted) adjacency matrix of a DAG causal model to help address this problem. We utilize existing low rank techniques to adapt causal structure learning methods to take advantage of this assumption and establish several useful results relating interpretable graphical conditions to the low rank assumption. Specifically, we show that the maximum rank is highly related to hubs, suggesting that scale-free networks, which are frequently encountered in practice, tend to be low rank. Our experiments demonstrate the utility of the low rank adaptations for a variety of data models, especially with relatively large and dense graphs. Moreover, with a validation procedure, the adaptations maintain a superior or comparable performance even when graphs are not restricted to be low rank.

Ignavier Ng, Shengyu Zhu, Zhitang Chen et al.

Causal structure learning has been a challenging task in the past decades and several mainstream approaches such as constraint- and score-based methods have been studied with theoretical guarantees. Recently, a new approach has transformed the combinatorial structure learning problem into a continuous one and then solved it using gradient-based optimization methods. Following the recent state-of-the-arts, we propose a new gradient-based method to learn causal structures from observational data. The proposed method generalizes the recent gradient-based methods to a graph autoencoder framework that allows nonlinear structural equation models and is easily applicable to vector-valued variables. We demonstrate that on synthetic datasets, our proposed method outperforms other gradient-based methods significantly, especially on large causal graphs. We further investigate the scalability and efficiency of our method, and observe a near linear training time when scaling up the graph size.

Ignavier Ng, Shengyu Zhu, Zhuangyan Fang et al.

This paper studies the problem of learning causal structures from observational data. We reformulate the Structural Equation Model (SEM) with additive noises in a form parameterized by binary graph adjacency matrix and show that, if the original SEM is identifiable, then the binary adjacency matrix can be identified up to super-graphs of the true causal graph under mild conditions. We then utilize the reformulated SEM to develop a causal structure learning method that can be efficiently trained using gradient-based optimization, by leveraging a smooth characterization on acyclicity and the Gumbel-Softmax approach to approximate the binary adjacency matrix. It is found that the obtained entries are typically near zero or one and can be easily thresholded to identify the edges. We conduct experiments on synthetic and real datasets to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, and show that it readily includes different smooth model functions and achieves a much improved performance on most datasets considered.

Zhitang Chen, Shengyu Zhu, Yue Liu et al.

Reasoning based on causality, instead of association has been considered as a key ingredient towards real machine intelligence. However, it is a challenging task to infer causal relationship/structure among variables. In recent years, an Independent Mechanism (IM) principle was proposed, stating that the mechanism generating the cause and the one mapping the cause to the effect are independent. As the conjecture, it is argued that in the causal direction, the conditional distributions instantiated at different value of the conditioning variable have less variation than the anti-causal direction. Existing state-of-the-arts simply compare the variance of the RKHS mean embedding norms of these conditional distributions. In this paper, we prove that this norm-based approach sacrifices important information of the original conditional distributions. We propose a Kernel Intrinsic Invariance Measure (KIIM) to capture higher order statistics corresponding to the shapes of the density functions. We show our algorithm can be reduced to an eigen-decomposition task on a kernel matrix measuring intrinsic deviance/invariance. Causal directions can then be inferred by comparing the KIIM scores of two hypothetic directions. Experiments on synthetic and real data are conducted to show the advantages of our methods over existing solutions.

Shengyu Zhu, Biao Chen, Zhitang Chen et al.

We characterize the asymptotic performance of nonparametric one- and two-sample testing. The exponential decay rate or error exponent of the type-II error probability is used as the asymptotic performance metric, and an optimal test achieves the maximum rate subject to a constant level constraint on the type-I error probability. With Sanov's theorem, we derive a sufficient condition for one-sample tests to achieve the optimal error exponent in the universal setting, i.e., for any distribution defining the alternative hypothesis. We then show that two classes of Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) based tests attain the optimal type-II error exponent on $\mathbb R^d$, while the quadratic-time Kernel Stein Discrepancy (KSD) based tests achieve this optimality with an asymptotic level constraint. For general two-sample testing, however, Sanov's theorem is insufficient to obtain a similar sufficient condition. We proceed to establish an extended version of Sanov's theorem and derive an exact error exponent for the quadratic-time MMD based two-sample tests. The obtained error exponent is further shown to be optimal among all two-sample tests satisfying a given level constraint. Our work hence provides an achievability result for optimal nonparametric one- and two-sample testing in the universal setting. Application to off-line change detection and related issues are also discussed.

Shengyu Zhu, Ignavier Ng, Zhitang Chen

Discovering causal structure among a set of variables is a fundamental problem in many empirical sciences. Traditional score-based casual discovery methods rely on various local heuristics to search for a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) according to a predefined score function. While these methods, e.g., greedy equivalence search, may have attractive results with infinite samples and certain model assumptions, they are usually less satisfactory in practice due to finite data and possible violation of assumptions. Motivated by recent advances in neural combinatorial optimization, we propose to use Reinforcement Learning (RL) to search for the DAG with the best scoring. Our encoder-decoder model takes observable data as input and generates graph adjacency matrices that are used to compute rewards. The reward incorporates both the predefined score function and two penalty terms for enforcing acyclicity. In contrast with typical RL applications where the goal is to learn a policy, we use RL as a search strategy and our final output would be the graph, among all graphs generated during training, that achieves the best reward. We conduct experiments on both synthetic and real datasets, and show that the proposed approach not only has an improved search ability but also allows a flexible score function under the acyclicity constraint.

Shengyu Zhu, Biao Chen, Zhitang Chen

Given two sets of independent samples from unknown distributions $P$ and $Q$, a two-sample test decides whether to reject the null hypothesis that $P=Q$. Recent attention has focused on kernel two-sample tests as the test statistics are easy to compute, converge fast, and have low bias with their finite sample estimates. However, there still lacks an exact characterization on the asymptotic performance of such tests, and in particular, the rate at which the type-II error probability decays to zero in the large sample limit. In this work, we establish that a class of kernel two-sample tests are exponentially consistent with Polish, locally compact Hausdorff sample space, e.g., $\mathbb R^d$. The obtained exponential decay rate is further shown to be optimal among all two-sample tests satisfying the level constraint, and is independent of particular kernels provided that they are bounded continuous and characteristic. Our results gain new insights into related issues such as fair alternative for testing and kernel selection strategy. Finally, as an application, we show that a kernel based test achieves the optimal detection for off-line change detection in the nonparametric setting.

Shengyu Zhu, Biao Chen, Pengfei Yang et al.

We characterize the asymptotic performance of nonparametric goodness of fit testing. The exponential decay rate of the type-II error probability is used as the asymptotic performance metric, and a test is optimal if it achieves the maximum rate subject to a constant level constraint on the type-I error probability. We show that two classes of Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) based tests attain this optimality on $\mathbb R^d$, while the quadratic-time Kernel Stein Discrepancy (KSD) based tests achieve the maximum exponential decay rate under a relaxed level constraint. Under the same performance metric, we proceed to show that the quadratic-time MMD based two-sample tests are also optimal for general two-sample problems, provided that kernels are bounded continuous and characteristic. Key to our approach are Sanov's theorem from large deviation theory and the weak metrizable properties of the MMD and KSD.