[Submitted on 29 Sep 2026]
Abstract:Modern experiments increasingly produce rich post-treatment objects—such as text, images, and video—that may provide early surrogate signals for outcomes that are delayed, expensive, or observed only for a subset of participants. A pretrained encoder can turn such an object into a strong generic embedding, but the embedding is not trained for the estimation tasks required by a causal estimator and may emphasize information irrelevant to the causal target. We propose SIRNET, a Surrogate-Informed Representation adaptation framework for neural-NETwork-based causal estimation in the presence of unstructured post-treatment surrogates. Starting from pretrained surrogate embeddings, SIRNET learns a shared adapter jointly for outcome prediction, treatment propensity, and arm-specific surrogate marginalization, beyond the generic pretraining objective. The resulting covariate and surrogate representations provide a common interface for these nuisance tasks. The final treatment-effect estimate and confidence interval are obtained from cross-fitted orthogonal scores that attain the semiparametric efficiency bound under the stated nuisance-rate conditions. We also validate SIRNET’s performance in synthetic and semisynthetic experiments, as well as the Anti-Amyloid in Asymptomatic Alzheimer’s Disease (A4) trial, using frozen pretrained brain-MRI embeddings as surrogates for a long-term outcome.
Submission history
From: Lei Shi [view email]
[v1] Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:56:12 UTC (495 KB)
