基于流匹配的反事实生成：耦合敏感的端到端速率

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Abstract:Counterfactual generation seeks to sample outcomes under a hypothetical intervention or decision using observational data collected under the factual assignment mechanism. We develop a flow-matching approach that combines a sample-split, doubly robust training objective with a learned coupling between observed source outcomes and target outcomes drawn from a fitted conditional outcome model. To enable finite-step generation, we leverage a score-corrected stochastic sampler based on a Gaussian-smoothed interpolation. Our main theoretical contribution is a coupling-sensitive KL bound for constant-step Euler discretization: the error is controlled by moments of the source--target displacement under the chosen coupling, rather than by global uniform regularity of the velocity field, and has near-linear dependence on the ambient dimension. We also establish finite-sample non-parametric guarantees for the learned velocity and score fields when both the conditional outcome model and the source-target coupling are estimated from data. These bounds separate approximation, coupling-replacement, nuisance-estimation, generalization, and Monte Carlo errors and, combined with the sampler analysis, yield an end-to-end guarantee for counterfactual generation. Experiments on synthetic and semi-synthetic image benchmarks support the coupling-dependent theory and show that, at finite discretization budgets, the stochastic sampler can outperform the corresponding deterministic ODE sampler.

Subjects:	Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Statistics Theory (math.ST); Machine Learning (stat.ML)
Cite as:	arXiv:2610.01193 [cs.LG]
	(or arXiv:2610.01193v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
	https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.01193 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Yunrui Guan [view email]
[v1] Thu, 1 Oct 2026 07:05:31 UTC (6,308 KB)