cs.LGMay 8, 2026

Mask2Cause: Causal Discovery via Adjacency Constrained Causal Attention

Authors: Omar MuhammadPasupuleti Dhruv ShivkantDeepak N. Subramani

Organizations: 1Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, India

Abstract

Leveraging deep learning for causal discovery in time series remains challenging because existing neural methods predominantly rely on component-wise architectures that fail to capture shared system dynamics or employ decoupled post-hoc graph extraction that risks overfitting to spurious correlations. We propose Mask2Cause\textbf{Mask2Cause}, an end-to-end framework that recovers the underlying causal graph directly during the forecasting forward pass. Our approach introduces an Inverted Variable Embedding and an Adjacency-Constrained Masked Attention mechanism, trained with homoscedastic or heteroscedastic objectives to capture causal influences in both mean and variance. Empirical results on diverse benchmarks, from synthetic chaotic dynamics to realistic biological simulations, demonstrate state-of-the-art causal discovery with significantly reduced parameter complexity compared to standard baselines. We further show that inferred causal structures can be used to reduce parameter count of forecasting models by more than 70% on average while maintaining predictive accuracy.

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. FoundCause: Causal Discovery with Latent Confounders from Observational Data

    Jun 16, 2026Patrick Blöbaum, Krishnakumar Balasubramanian, Shiva Prasad KasiviswanathanCausal Foundation ModelsStructural Causal Model