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Reliable causal inference is essential for making decisions in high-stakes areas like medicine, economics, and public policy. However, it remains unclear whether large language models (LLMs) can handle rigorous and trustworthy statistical…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Jin Du , Li Chen , Xun Xian , An Luo , Fangqiao Tian , Ganghua Wang , Charles Doss , Xiaotong Shen , Jie Ding

Large language model (LLM) agents-especially smaller, open-source models-often produce causally invalid or incoherent actions in collaborative tasks due to their reliance on surface-level correlations rather than grounded causal reasoning.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Minh Hoang Nguyen , Van Dai Do , Dung Nguyen , Thin Nguyen , Hung Le

Large language models (LLMs) have mastered abundant simple and explicit commonsense knowledge through pre-training, enabling them to achieve human-like performance in simple commonsense reasoning. Nevertheless, LLMs struggle to reason with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Kai Xiong , Xiao Ding , Yixin Cao , Yuxiong Yan , Li Du , Yufei Zhang , Jinglong Gao , Jiaqian Liu , Bing Qin , Ting Liu

Large Language Models (LLMs) are commonly criticized for not understanding language. However, many critiques focus on cognitive abilities that, in humans, are distinct from language processing. Here, we instead study a kind of understanding…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Joseph M. Denning , Xiaohan Hannah Guo , Bryor Snefjella , Idan A. Blank

Contextual causal reasoning is a critical yet challenging capability for Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing benchmarks, however, often evaluate this skill in fragmented settings, failing to ensure context consistency or cover the full…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Pengfeng Li , Chen Huang , Chaoqun Hao , Hongyao Chen , Xiao-Yong Wei , Wenqiang Lei , See-Kiong Ng

As large language models (LLMs) witness increasing deployment in complex, high-stakes decision-making scenarios, it becomes imperative to ground their reasoning in causality rather than spurious correlations. However, strong performance on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yuzhe Wang , Yaochen Zhu , Jundong Li

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have shown significant advancements across diverse natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, including intelligent dialogue and autonomous agents. Yet, lacking widely acknowledged testing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-10 Jinyang Wu , Feihu Che , Xinxin Zheng , Shuai Zhang , Ruihan Jin , Shuai Nie , Pengpeng Shao , Jianhua Tao

The widespread success of large language models (LLMs) on NLP benchmarks has been accompanied by concerns that LLMs function primarily as stochastic parrots that reproduce texts similar to what they saw during pre-training, often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Ziling Cheng , Meng Cao , Marc-Antoine Rondeau , Jackie Chi Kit Cheung

Causal discovery from observational data is pivotal for deciphering complex relationships. Causal Structure Learning (CSL), which focuses on deriving causal Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) from data, faces challenges due to vast DAG spaces…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Taiyu Ban , Lyuzhou Chen , Derui Lyu , Xiangyu Wang , Huanhuan Chen

Interpretability research on large language models (LLMs) has yielded important insights into model behaviour, yet recurring pitfalls persist: findings that do not generalise, and causal interpretations that outrun the evidence. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Shruti Joshi , Aaron Mueller , David Klindt , Wieland Brendel , Patrik Reizinger , Dhanya Sridhar

Large language models (LLM) have emerged as a powerful tool for AI, with the key ability of in-context learning (ICL), where they can perform well on unseen tasks based on a brief series of task examples without necessitating any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Zhenmei Shi , Junyi Wei , Zhuoyan Xu , Yingyu Liang

Chain-of-thought emerges as a promising technique for eliciting reasoning capabilities from Large Language Models (LLMs). However, it does not always improve task performance or accurately represent reasoning processes, leaving unresolved…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-13 Guangsheng Bao , Hongbo Zhang , Cunxiang Wang , Linyi Yang , Yue Zhang

Causal Machine Learning (CausalML) is an umbrella term for machine learning methods that formalize the data-generation process as a structural causal model (SCM). This perspective enables us to reason about the effects of changes to this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Jean Kaddour , Aengus Lynch , Qi Liu , Matt J. Kusner , Ricardo Silva

Cross-modal reasoning (CMR), the intricate process of synthesizing and drawing inferences across divergent sensory modalities, is increasingly recognized as a crucial capability in the progression toward more sophisticated and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Shengsheng Qian , Zuyi Zhou , Dizhan Xue , Bing Wang , Changsheng Xu

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate the capacity to reconstruct and trace learned content from their training data under specific elicitation conditions, yet this capability does not manifest in standard generation contexts. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Toshiyuki Shigemura

Large Language Models have shown tremendous performance on a large variety of natural language processing tasks, ranging from text comprehension to common sense reasoning. However, the mechanisms responsible for this success remain opaque,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-04 Gaël Gendron , Qiming Bao , Michael Witbrock , Gillian Dobbie

Behavioral simulation is increasingly used to anticipate responses to interventions. Large language models (LLMs) enable researchers to specify population characteristics and intervention context in natural language, but it remains unclear…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Zonghan Li , Feng Ji

Pre-trained language models based on masked language modeling (MLM) excel in natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. While fine-tuned MLM-based encoders consistently outperform causal language modeling decoders of comparable size,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 David Dukić , Jan Šnajder

While LLMs exhibit impressive fluency and factual recall, they struggle with robust causal reasoning, often relying on spurious correlations and brittle patterns. Similarly, traditional Reinforcement Learning agents also lack causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Abi Aryan , Zac Liu

In context learning (ICL) underpins recent advances in large language models (LLMs), although its role and performance in causal reasoning remains unclear. Causal reasoning demands multihop composition and strict conjunctive control, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Amartya Roy , Elamparithy M , Kripabandhu Ghosh , Ponnurangam Kumaraguru , Adrian de Wynter