Cyclic Counterfactuals under Shift–Scale Interventions

Saptarshi Saha, Dhruv Rathore, Utpal Garain

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Main Conference Track

Most counterfactual inference frameworks traditionally assume acyclic structural causal models (SCMs), i.e. directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). However, many real-world systems (e.g. biological systems) contain feedback loops or cyclic dependencies that violate acyclicity. In this work, we study counterfactual inference in cyclic SCMs under shift–scale interventions, i.e., soft, policy-style changes that rescale and/or shift a variable’s mechanism.