English

Exploring Multi-Modal Data with Tool-Augmented LLM Agents for Precise Causal Discovery

Machine Learning 2025-06-03 v2 Artificial Intelligence Methodology

Abstract

Causal discovery is an imperative foundation for decision-making across domains, such as smart health, AI for drug discovery and AIOps. Traditional statistical causal discovery methods, while well-established, predominantly rely on observational data and often overlook the semantic cues inherent in cause-and-effect relationships. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has ushered in an affordable way of leveraging the semantic cues for knowledge-driven causal discovery, but the development of LLMs for causal discovery lags behind other areas, particularly in the exploration of multi-modal data. To bridge the gap, we introduce MATMCD, a multi-agent system powered by tool-augmented LLMs. MATMCD has two key agents: a Data Augmentation agent that retrieves and processes modality-augmented data, and a Causal Constraint agent that integrates multi-modal data for knowledge-driven reasoning. The proposed design of the inner-workings ensures successful cooperation of the agents. Our empirical study across seven datasets suggests the significant potential of multi-modality enhanced causal discovery.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.13667,
  title  = {Exploring Multi-Modal Data with Tool-Augmented LLM Agents for Precise Causal Discovery},
  author = {ChengAo Shen and Zhengzhang Chen and Dongsheng Luo and Dongkuan Xu and Haifeng Chen and Jingchao Ni},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.13667},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:40:10.938Z