Guide, Not Bind: Why Defeasible Priors Fail in Augmented Lagrangian Causal Discovery
Differentiable causal discovery methods increasingly encode expert priors as forbidden-edge constraints enforced by an Augmented Lagrangian (ALM) penalty, on the assumption that a data-adaptive relaxation mechanism will discount and eventually override a rule the data consistently contradicts. We show this design, which we call \emph{guide, not bind}, fails for two independent, precisely characterized reasons, and that directly repairing both restores it only partially. First, sequential penalty-ramping ALM suppresses a wrongly-forbidden true edge before any counterfactual check can detect it: we give three necessary conditions any adaptive relaxation must satisfy to avoid this (Propositi...
| Authors | Sairam Sundararaman, Sara Girdhar, Manit Narasimha Murthy et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 3 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 September 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.