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.

Few-shot learning, aiming to distinguish unseen classes by training with few labeled samples, is still challenged by the overfitting problem. The transductive few-shot learning paradigm enables us to reduce overfitting by training a highly discriminative feature representation via self-supervised learning since the entire unlabeled samples are allowed to be accessed. In this paper, we propose a simple but efficient approach based on self-supervised pre-training and nearest class prototype search, which can obtain a significant improvement in the performance of transductive few-shot learning tasks without external samples. However, since the class prototype is obtained through limited support samples, it is easily affected by biased samples. Therefore, we propose to train a conditional generative adversarial network to estimate the distribution of features instead of assuming it follows Gaussian distribution as previous arts. Thus, we can generate features that are closed to real features from the estimated distribution to calibrate the distribution of the class prototype. Finally, more detailed experiments show that our method can exceed plenty of recent transductive few-shot learning methods significantly and achieve 9.83% and 4.38% improvements over the existing best method under the transductive 5-way 1-shot and 5-shot settings with ResNet-12 on the miniImageNet.

Extreme multi-label text classification(XMC) is a task for finding the most relevant labels from a large label set. Nowadays deep learning-based methods have shown significant success in XMC. However, the existing methods (e.g., AttentionXML and X-Transformer etc) still suffer from 1) combining several models to train and predict for one dataset, and 2) sampling negative labels statically during the process of training label ranking model, which will harm the performance and accuracy of model. To address the above problems, we propose LightXML, which adopts end-to-end training and dynamical negative labels sampling. In LightXML, we use GAN like networks to recall and rank labels. The label recalling part will generate negative and positive labels, and the label ranking part will distinguish positive labels from these labels. Based on these networks, negative labels are sampled dynamically during label ranking part training. With feeding both label recalling and ranking parts with the same text representation, LightXML can reach high performance. Extensive experiments show that LightXML outperforms state-of-the-art methods in five extreme multi-label datasets with much smaller model size and lower computational complexity. In particular, on the Amazon dataset with 670K labels, LightXML can reduce the model size up to 72% compared to AttentionXML. Our code is available at http://github.com/kongds/LightXML.