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To perform effective causal inference in high-dimensional datasets, initiating the process with causal discovery is imperative, wherein a causal graph is generated based on observational data. However, obtaining a complete and accurate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Elahe Khatibi , Mahyar Abbasian , Zhongqi Yang , Iman Azimi , Amir M. Rahmani

Large Language Models (LLMs) can achieve strong performance on many tasks by producing step-by-step reasoning before giving a final output, often referred to as chain-of-thought reasoning (CoT). It is tempting to interpret these CoT…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Miles Turpin , Julian Michael , Ethan Perez , Samuel R. Bowman

The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform reasoning tasks such as deduction has been widely investigated in recent years. Yet, their capacity to generate proofs-faithful, human-readable explanations of why conclusions…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Hui Yang , Jiaoyan Chen , Uli Sattler

Large language models (LLMs) are the result of a massive experiment in bottom-up, data-driven reverse engineering of language at scale. Despite their utility in a number of downstream NLP tasks, ample research has shown that LLMs are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-05 Walid S. Saba

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable breadth of knowledge, yet their ability to reason about computational processes remains poorly understood. Closing this gap matters for practitioners who rely on LLMs to guide algorithm…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Sohan Venkatesh , Ashish Mahendran Kurapath , Tejas Melkote

Revealing hidden causal variables alongside the underlying causal mechanisms is essential to the development of science. Despite the progress in the past decades, existing practice in causal discovery (CD) heavily relies on high-quality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Chenxi Liu , Yongqiang Chen , Tongliang Liu , Mingming Gong , James Cheng , Bo Han , Kun Zhang

LLMs suffer from critical reasoning issues such as unfaithfulness, bias, and inconsistency, since they lack robust causal underpinnings and may rely on superficial correlations rather than genuine understanding. Successive LRMs have emerged…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Zhizhang FU , Guangsheng Bao , Hongbo Zhang , Chenkai Hu , Yue Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in manipulating natural language across multiple applications, but their ability to handle simple reasoning tasks is often questioned. In this work, we aim to provide a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Alessandro Raganato , Rafael Peñaloza , Marco Viviani , Gabriella Pasi

Although Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has achieved remarkable success in enhancing the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), the mechanism of CoT remains a ``black box''. Even if the correct answers can frequently be obtained,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Jiarun Fu , Lizhong Ding , Hao Li , Pengqi Li , Qiuning Wei , Xu Chen

The impressive linguistic abilities of large language models (LLMs) have recommended them as models of human sentence processing, with some conjecturing a positive 'quality-power' relationship (Wilcox et al., 2023), in which language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Yi-Chien Lin , Hongao Zhu , William Schuler

Large language models (LLMs) have shown potential in identifying qualitative causal relations, but their ability to perform quantitative causal reasoning -- estimating effect sizes that parametrize functional relationships -- remains…

Large language models (LLMs) solve complex problems yet fail on simpler variants, suggesting they achieve correct outputs through mechanisms fundamentally different from human reasoning. To understand this gap, we synthesize cognitive…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been touted as AI models possessing advanced reasoning abilities. In theory, autoregressive LLMs with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) can perform more serial computations to solve complex reasoning tasks. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Rishi Hazra , Gabriele Venturato , Pedro Zuidberg Dos Martires , Luc De Raedt

Analogical reasoning is at the core of human cognition, serving as an important foundation for a variety of intellectual activities. While prior work has shown that LLMs can represent task patterns and surface-level concepts, it remains…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Taewhoo Lee , Minju Song , Chanwoong Yoon , Jungwoo Park , Jaewoo Kang

Recent benchmarks reveal that despite strong reasoning capabilities, large language models (LLMs) still struggle to faithfully apply complex contextual knowledge. These failures are often not wholesale reasoning collapses: in context-rich…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Hongbo Jin , Chi Wang , Haoran Tang , Zhongjing Du , Xu Jiang , Jingqi Tian , Qiaoman Zhang , Jiayu Ding

Causal graph recovery is traditionally done using statistical estimation-based methods or based on individual's knowledge about variables of interests. They often suffer from data collection biases and limitations of individuals' knowledge.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Yuzhe Zhang , Yipeng Zhang , Yidong Gan , Lina Yao , Chen Wang

Randomized experiments or randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are gold standards for causal inference, yet cost and sample-size constraints limit power. We introduce CALM (Causal Analysis leveraging Language Models), a statistical framework…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-09 Xinrui Ruan , Xinwei Ma , Yingfei Wang , Waverly Wei , Jingshen Wang

Neurally-parameterized Structural Causal Models in the Pearlian notion to causality, referred to as NCM, were recently introduced as a step towards next-generation learning systems. However, said NCM are only concerned with the learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-27 Matej Zečević , Devendra Singh Dhami , Kristian Kersting

The self-attention revolution allowed generative language models to scale and achieve increasingly impressive abilities. Such models - commonly referred to as Large Language Models (LLMs) - have recently gained prominence with the general…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-04-19 Da Silva Gameiro Henrique , Andrei Kucharavy , Rachid Guerraoui

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly being integrated into scientific research, particularly in the social sciences, where understanding human behavior is critical. Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in replicating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Ziyan Cui , Ning Li , Huaikang Zhou