English
Related papers

Related papers: Causal Parrots: Large Language Models May Talk Cau…

200 papers

Building causal graphs can be a laborious process. To ensure all relevant causal pathways have been captured, researchers often have to discuss with clinicians and experts while also reviewing extensive relevant medical literature. By…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Stephanie Long , Tibor Schuster , Alexandre Piché

The ability to perform causal reasoning is widely considered a core feature of intelligence. In this work, we investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can coherently reason about causality. Much of the existing work in natural…

As language models (LMs) deliver increasing performance on a range of NLP tasks, probing classifiers have become an indispensable technique in the effort to better understand their inner workings. A typical setup involves (1) defining an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-01 Charles Jin , Martin Rinard

With the rise of Large Language Models(LLMs), it has become crucial to understand their capabilities and limitations in deciphering and explaining the complex web of causal relationships that language entails. Current methods use either…

Causal reasoning capabilities are essential for large language models (LLMs) in a wide range of applications, such as education and healthcare. But there is still a lack of benchmarks for a better understanding of such capabilities. Current…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-25 Ruibo Tu , Hedvig Kjellström , Gustav Eje Henter , Cheng Zhang

Despite surpassing human performance across mathematics, coding, and other knowledge-intensive tasks, large language models (LLMs) continue to struggle with causal reasoning. A core obstacle is the target data itself: causal systems are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Nicolás Astorga , Anita Kriz , Mihaela van der Schaar

How does a cause lead to an effect, and which intermediate causal steps explain their connection? This work scrutinizes the mechanistic causal reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to answer these questions through the task…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Liesbeth Allein , Nataly Pineda-Castañeda , Andrea Rocci , Marie-Francine Moens

Understanding and inferring causal relationships from texts is a core aspect of human cognition and is essential for advancing large language models (LLMs) towards artificial general intelligence. Existing work evaluating LLM causal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Ryan Saklad , Aman Chadha , Oleg Pavlov , Raha Moraffah

Causal discovery for both cross-sectional and temporal data has traditionally followed a dataset-specific paradigm, where a new model is fitted for each individual dataset. Such an approach limits the potential of multi-dataset pretraining.…

Extracting abstract causal structures and applying them to novel situations is a hallmark of human intelligence. While Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong performance on a wide range of reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Liangru Xiang , Yuxi Ma , Zhihao Cao , Yixin Zhu , Song-Chun Zhu

Causal learning is the cognitive process of developing the capability of making causal inferences based on available information, often guided by normative principles. This process is prone to errors and biases, such as the illusion of…

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in biomedicine but lack true causal understanding, relying instead on correlations. This paper envisions causal LLM agents that integrate multimodal data (text, images, genomics, etc.) and perform…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Adib Bazgir , Amir Habibdoust Lafmajani , Yuwen Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on enormous amounts of data and encode knowledge in their parameters. We propose a pipeline to elicit causal relationships from LLMs. Specifically, (i) we sample many documents from LLMs on a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Takashi Kameyama , Masahiro Kato , Yasuko Hio , Yasushi Takano , Naoto Minakawa

Scaling laws have allowed Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) into the field of causal reasoning. Causal reasoning of PLM relies solely on text-based descriptions, in contrast to causal discovery which aims to determine the causal…

The ability to understand causality significantly impacts the competence of large language models (LLMs) in output explanation and counterfactual reasoning, as causality reveals the underlying data distribution. However, the lack of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-30 Yu Zhou , Xingyu Wu , Beicheng Huang , Jibin Wu , Liang Feng , Kay Chen Tan

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive capabilities across a range of reasoning and generation tasks. However, research studies have shown that LLMs lack the ability to identify causal relationships, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Juncheng Dong , Yiling Liu , Ahmed Aloui , Vahid Tarokh , David Carlson

Causality is essential in scientific research, enabling researchers to interpret true relationships between variables. These causal relationships are often represented by causal graphs, which are directed acyclic graphs. With the recent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Ivaxi Sheth , Bahare Fatemi , Mario Fritz

Causal reasoning, the ability to identify cause-and-effect relationship, is crucial in human thinking. Although large language models (LLMs) succeed in many NLP tasks, it is still challenging for them to conduct complex causal reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Xiao Liu , Da Yin , Chen Zhang , Yansong Feng , Dongyan Zhao

Genes, proteins and other biological entities influence one another via causal molecular networks. Causal relationships in such networks are mediated by complex and diverse mechanisms, through latent variables, and are often specific to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Izzy Newsham , Luka Kovačević , Richard Moulange , Nan Rosemary Ke , Sach Mukherjee

Causal reasoning is viewed as crucial for achieving human-level machine intelligence. Recent advances in language models have expanded the horizons of artificial intelligence across various domains, sparking inquiries into their potential…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Sirui Chen , Bo Peng , Meiqi Chen , Ruiqi Wang , Mengying Xu , Xingyu Zeng , Rui Zhao , Shengjie Zhao , Yu Qiao , Chaochao Lu