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Causal-Symbolic Meta-Learning (CSML): Inducing Causal World Models for Few-Shot Generalization

Machine Learning 2025-09-17 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Modern deep learning models excel at pattern recognition but remain fundamentally limited by their reliance on spurious correlations, leading to poor generalization and a demand for massive datasets. We argue that a key ingredient for human-like intelligence-robust, sample-efficient learning-stems from an understanding of causal mechanisms. In this work, we introduce Causal-Symbolic Meta-Learning (CSML), a novel framework that learns to infer the latent causal structure of a task distribution. CSML comprises three key modules: a perception module that maps raw inputs to disentangled symbolic representations; a differentiable causal induction module that discovers the underlying causal graph governing these symbols and a graph-based reasoning module that leverages this graph to make predictions. By meta-learning a shared causal world model across a distribution of tasks, CSML can rapidly adapt to novel tasks, including those requiring reasoning about interventions and counterfactuals, from only a handful of examples. We introduce CausalWorld, a new physics-based benchmark designed to test these capabilities. Our experiments show that CSML dramatically outperforms state-of-the-art meta-learning and neuro-symbolic baselines, particularly on tasks demanding true causal inference.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.12387,
  title  = {Causal-Symbolic Meta-Learning (CSML): Inducing Causal World Models for Few-Shot Generalization},
  author = {Mohamed Zayaan S},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.12387},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

10 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:37:48.543Z