CauF-VAE: Causal Disentangled Representation Learning with VAE and Causal Flows

Disentangled representation learning aims to learn a low dimensional representation of data where each dimension corresponds to one underlying generative factor. Due to the causal relationships between generative factors in real-world situations, causal disentangled representation learning has received widespread attention. In this paper, we first propose a variant of autoregressive flows, called causal flows, which incorporate true causal structure of generative factors into the flows. Then, we design a new VAE model based on causal flows named Causal Flows Variational Autoencoders (CauF-VAE) to learn causally disentangled representations. We provide a theoretical analysis of the disentanglement identifiability of CauF-VAE by incorporating supervised information on the ground-truth factors. The performance of CauF-VAE is evaluated on both synthetic and real datasets, showing its capability of achieving causal disentanglement and performing intervention experiments. Moreover, CauF-VAE exhibits remarkable performance on downstream tasks and has the potential to learn true causal structure among factors.