Test Time Training for Supervised Causal Learning
Abstract
Supervised Causal Learning (SCL) has shown promise in causal discovery by framing it as a supervised learning problem. However, it suffers from significant out-of-distribution generalization challenges. We reveal three limitations of previous SCL practices: a significant performance gap between synthetic benchmarks and real-world data, fragility to distribution shifts, and failure in compositional generalization, collectively questioning its real-world applicability. To address this, we propose Test-Time Training for Supervised Causal Learning (TTT-SCL), a novel framework that dynamically generates training sets explicitly aligned with any specific test instance. We demonstrate the correlation between TTT-SCL and score-based methods, and design an efficient module for generating training sets based on the classic scoring function. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks, pseudo-real and real-world datasets demonstrate that TTT-SCL significantly outperforms existing SCL and traditional causal discovery methods.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.30015,
title = {Test Time Training for Supervised Causal Learning},
author = {Zizhen Deng and Jiaru Zhang and Rui Ding and Huang Bojun and Jinzhuo Wang and Qiang Fu and Shi Han and Dongmei Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.30015},
year = {2026}
}