Graph neural architecture search (NAS) has emerged as a promising approach for autonomously designing graph neural network architectures by leveraging correlations between graphs and architectures. However, existing methods merely rely on correlations, which may be spurious and vary across distributions. This reliance, without considering causal graph-architecture relationships, limits their ability to generalize under distribution shifts that are ubiquitous in real-world graph scenarios. In this paper, we propose to handle the distribution shifts in NAS process by exploiting the causal graph-architecture relationship to search for optimal architectures that can generalize under distribution shifts. Key challenges remain unexplored: discovering causal graph-architecture relationships with stable cross-distribution predictive abilities, and leveraging them to handle distribution shifts. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach, Causal-aware Graph Neural Architecture Search (CARNAS), which is capable of capturing causal graph-architecture relationship during NAS process and discovering optimal graph architecture under distribution shifts. We propose Disentangled Causal Subgraph Identification to extract causal subgraphs with stable predictive power across distributions, followed by Graph Embedding Intervention to intervene on these subgraphs in latent space by preserving essential features while filtering out non-causal elements, and Invariant Architecture Customization to enhance their causal invariance for optimizing graph architectures. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that CARNAS enhances out-of-distribution generalization by uncovering causal graph-architecture relationships during NAS.

In the field of Artificial Intelligence for Information Technology Operations, causal discovery is pivotal for operation and maintenance of systems, facilitating downstream industrial tasks such as root cause analysis. Temporal causal discovery, as an emerging method, aims to identify temporal causal relations between variables directly from observations by utilizing interventional data. However, existing methods mainly focus on synthetic datasets with heavy reliance on interventional targets and ignore the textual information hidden in real-world systems, failing to conduct causal discovery for real industrial scenarios. To tackle this problem, in this paper we investigate temporal causal discovery in industrial scenarios, which faces two critical challenges: how to discover causal relations without the interventional targets that are costly to obtain in practice, and how to discover causal relations via leveraging the textual information in systems which can be complex yet abundant in industrial contexts. To address these challenges, we propose the RealTCD framework, which is able to leverage domain knowledge to discover temporal causal relations without interventional targets. We first develop a score-based temporal causal discovery method capable of discovering causal relations without relying on interventional targets through strategic masking and regularization. Then, by employing Large Language Models (LLMs) to handle texts and integrate domain knowledge, we introduce LLM-guided meta-initialization to extract the meta-knowledge from textual information hidden in systems to boost the quality of discovery. We conduct extensive experiments on both simulation datasets and our real-world application scenario to show the superiority of our proposed RealTCD over existing baselines in temporal causal discovery.

Causal learning from observational data has garnered attention as controlled experiments can be costly. To enhance identifiability, incorporating intervention data has become a mainstream approach. However, these methods have yet to be explored in the context of time series data, despite their success in static data. To address this research gap, this paper presents a novel contribution. Firstly, a temporal interventional dataset with causal labels is introduced, derived from a data center IT room of a cloud service company. Secondly, this paper introduces TECDI, a novel approach for temporal causal discovery. TECDI leverages the smooth, algebraic characterization of acyclicity in causal graphs to efficiently uncover causal relationships. Experimental results on simulated and proposed real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of TECDI in accurately uncovering temporal causal relationships. The introduction of the temporal interventional dataset and the superior performance of TECDI contribute to advancing research in temporal causal discovery. Our datasets and codes have released at~\hrefhttps://github.com/lpwpower/TECDI https://github.com/lpwpower/TECDI.