A key challenge for controllable image editing is that visual attributes with semantic meanings are not always independent, resulting in spurious correlations in model training. However, most existing methods ignore such issues, leading to biased causal visual representation learning and unintended changes to unrelated regions or attributes in the edited images. To bridge this gap, we propose a diffusion-based causal visual representation learning framework called CIDiffuser to capture causal representations of visual attributes based on structural causal models to address the spurious correlation. Specifically, we first decompose the image representation into a high-level semantic representation for core attributes of the image and a low-level stochastic representation for other random or less structured aspects, with the former extracted by a semantic encoder and the latter derived via a stochastic encoder. We then introduce a causal effect learning module to capture the direct causal effect, that is, the difference of potential outcomes before and after intervening on the visual attributes. In addition, a diffusion-based learning strategy is designed to optimize the representation learning process. Empirical evaluations on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, enabling highly controllable image editing by modifying learned visual representations.

A significant challenge in air quality index (AQI) prediction is to accurately evaluate the potential outcomes after conducting interventions in pollutant factors such as industrial emissions for each enterprise. Existed methods often suffer from spurious correlations caused by unmeasured confounders and are lack of interpretability of the model, leading to sub-optimal prediction performance. This motivates us to propose a causal AQI prediction framework (CAP) that employs a structural causal model (SCM) to characterize the causal structural variability of various AQI factors for robust AQI prediction. Specifically, we employ the front-door adjustment to explicitly eliminate unmeasured confounders by intervening in industrial emissions from the target enterprise. Meanwhile, we take industrial emissions of neighboring enterprises into account when intervening in the target enterprise and simulate the dispersion of industrial emissions through a Gaussian plume model based on meteorological factors. Experiments on two real-world datasets validate the superior performance of our model on AQI prediction compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.

Artificial intelligence generated content (AIGC) has emerged as an indispensable tool for producing large-scale content in various forms, such as images, thanks to the significant role that AI plays in imitation and production. However, interpretability and controllability remain challenges. Existing AI methods often face challenges in producing images that are both flexible and controllable while considering causal relationships within the images. To address this issue, we have developed a novel method for causal controllable image generation (CCIG) that combines causal representation learning with bi-directional generative adversarial networks (GANs). This approach enables humans to control image attributes while considering the rationality and interpretability of the generated images and also allows for the generation of counterfactual images. The key of our approach, CCIG, lies in the use of a causal structure learning module to learn the causal relationships between image attributes and joint optimization with the encoder, generator, and joint discriminator in the image generation module. By doing so, we can learn causal representations in image’s latent space and use causal intervention operations to control image generation. We conduct extensive experiments on a real-world dataset, CelebA. The experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of CCIG.