{"paper":{"title":"Causal Foundation Models: Disentangling Physics from Instrument Properties","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["astro-ph.IM","astro-ph.SR","cs.AI"],"primary_cat":"cs.LG","authors_text":"Daniel Muthukrishna, David W. Hogg, Jeroen Audenaert, Paul F. Gregory, V. Ashley Villar","submitted_at":"2025-07-07T18:00:00Z","abstract_excerpt":"Foundation models for structured time series data must contend with a fundamental challenge: observations often conflate the true underlying physical phenomena with systematic distortions introduced by measurement instruments. This entanglement limits model generalization, especially in heterogeneous or multi-instrument settings. We present a causally-motivated foundation model that explicitly disentangles physical and instrumental factors using a dual-encoder architecture trained with structured contrastive learning. Leveraging naturally occurring observational triplets (i.e., where the same "},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2507.05333","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2507.05333/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}