Robustly Disentangled Causal Mechanisms: Validating Deep Representations for Interventional Robustness

Understand

The ability to learn disentangled representations that split underlying sources of variation in high dimensional, unstructured data is important for data efficient and robust use of neural networks.

• While various approaches aiming towards this goal have been proposed in recent times, a commonly accepted definition and validation procedure is missing.
• We provide a causal perspective on representation learning which covers disentanglement and domain shift robustness as special cases.
• Our causal framework allows us to introduce a new metric for the quantitative evaluation of deep latent variable models.