UnCLe: Towards Scalable Dynamic Causal Discovery in Non-linear Temporal Systems

Tingzhu Bi, Yicheng Pan, Xinrui Jiang, Huize Sun, Meng Ma, Ping Wang

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

Uncovering cause-effect relationships from observational time series is fundamental to understanding complex systems. While many methods infer static causal graphs, real-world systems often exhibit dynamic causality—where relationships evolve over time. Accurately capturing these temporal dynamics requires time-resolved causal graphs. We propose UnCLe, a novel deep learning method for scalable dynamic causal discovery. UnCLe employs a pair of Uncoupler and Recoupler networks to disentangle input time series into semantic representations and learns inter-variable dependencies via auto-regressive Dependency Matrices. It estimates dynamic causal influences by analyzing datapoint-wise prediction errors induced by temporal perturbations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UnCLe not only outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on static causal discovery benchmarks but, more importantly, exhibits a unique capability to accurately capture and represent evolving temporal causality in both synthetic and real-world dynamic systems (e.g., human motion). UnCLe offers a promising approach for revealing the underlying, time-varying mechanisms of complex phenomena.

10.52202/085713-3214