Orthogonal Uplift Learning with Permutation-Invariant Representations for Combinatorial Treatments

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Authors: Xinyan Su, Jiacan Gao, Mingyuan Ma, Xiao Xu, Xinrui Wan, Tianqi Gu, Enyun Yu, Jiecheng Guo, Zhiheng Zhang
Cited by: 0

Abstract

We study uplift estimation for combinatorial treatments. Uplift measures the pure incremental causal effect of an intervention (e.g., sending a coupon or a marketing message) on user behavior, modeled as a conditional individual treatment effect. Many real-world interventions are combinatorial: a treatment is a policy that specifies context-dependent action distributions rather than a single atomic label. Although recent work considers structured treatments, most methods rely on categorical or opaque encodings, limiting robustness and generalization to rare or newly deployed policies. We propose an uplift estimation framework that aligns treatment representation with causal semantics. Each policy is represented by the mixture it induces over contextaction components and embedded via a permutation-invariant aggregation. This representation is integrated into an orthogonalized low-rank uplift model, extending Robinson-style decompositions to learned, vector-valued treatments. We show that the resulting estimator is expressive for policy-induced causal effects, orthogonally robust to nuisance estimation errors, and stable under small policy perturbations. Experiments on large-scale randomized platform data demonstrate improved uplift accuracy and stability in long-tailed policy regimes

Fields of Study & Subjects

Advanced Causal Inference Techniques Advanced Bandit Algorithms Research Recommender Systems and Techniques

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
23 February 2026
Language
EN
Document type
Preprint