Distributionally Robust Causal Abstractions

Causal Abstraction (CA) theory provides a principled framework for relating causal models that describe the same system at different levels of granularity while ensuring interventional consistency between them. Recent methods for learning CAs, however, assume fixed and well-specified exogenous distributions, leaving them vulnerable to environmental shifts and model misspecification. In this work, we address these limitations by introducing the first class of distributionally robust CAs and their associated learning algorithms. The latter cast robust causal abstraction learning as a constrained min-max optimization problem with Wasserstein ambiguity sets. We provide theoretical guarantees for both empirical and Gaussian environments, enabling principled selection of ambiguity-set radii and establish quantitative guarantees on worst-case abstraction error. Furthermore, we present empirical evidence across different problems and CA learning methods, demonstrating our framework’s robustness not only to environmental shifts but also to structural and intervention mapping misspecification.