English

Can Post-Training Transform LLMs into Causal Reasoners?

Computation and Language 2026-02-09 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Causal inference is essential for decision-making but remains challenging for non-experts. While large language models (LLMs) show promise in this domain, their precise causal estimation capabilities are still limited, and the impact of post-training on these abilities is insufficiently explored. This paper examines the extent to which post-training can enhance LLMs' capacity for causal inference. We introduce CauGym, a comprehensive dataset comprising seven core causal tasks for training and five diverse test sets. Using this dataset, we systematically evaluate five post-training approaches: SFT, DPO, KTO, PPO, and GRPO. Across five in-domain and four existing benchmarks, our experiments demonstrate that appropriate post-training enables smaller LLMs to perform causal inference competitively, often surpassing much larger models. Our 14B parameter model achieves 93.5% accuracy on the CaLM benchmark, compared to 55.4% by OpenAI o3. Furthermore, the post-trained LLMs exhibit strong generalization and robustness under real-world conditions such as distribution shifts and noisy data. Collectively, these findings provide the first systematic evidence that targeted post-training can produce reliable and robust LLM-based causal reasoners. Our data and GRPO-model are available at https://github.com/OpenCausaLab/CauGym.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.06337,
  title  = {Can Post-Training Transform LLMs into Causal Reasoners?},
  author = {Junqi Chen and Sirui Chen and Chaochao Lu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.06337},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:23:37.933Z