Related papers: Causal Interventions on Causal Paths: Mapping GPT-…
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…
Mechanistic interpretability identifies internal circuits responsible for model behaviors, yet translating these findings into human-understandable explanations remains an open problem. We present a pipeline that bridges circuit-level…
The ability to robustly identify causal relationships is essential for autonomous decision-making and adaptation to novel scenarios. However, accurately inferring causal structure requires integrating both world knowledge and abstract…
Numerous decision-making tasks require estimating causal effects under interventions on different parts of a system. As practitioners consider using large language models (LLMs) to automate decisions, studying their causal reasoning…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown various ability on natural language processing, including problems about causality. It is not intuitive for LLMs to command causality, since pretrained models usually work on statistical associations,…
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…
Causal reasoning is one of the primary bottlenecks that Large Language Models (LLMs) must overcome to attain human-level intelligence. Recent studies indicate that LLMs display near-random performance on reasoning tasks. To address this, we…
Due to the size and complexity of modern large language models (LLMs), it has proven challenging to uncover the underlying mechanisms that models use to solve reasoning problems. For instance, is their reasoning for a specific problem…
Causal reasoning is a cornerstone of human intelligence and a critical capability for artificial systems aiming to achieve advanced understanding and decision-making. This thesis delves into various dimensions of causal reasoning and…
The causal capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are a matter of significant debate, with critical implications for the use of LLMs in societally impactful domains such as medicine, science, law, and policy. We conduct a "behavorial"…
We show how causal interventions in Transformer models provide insights into English syntax by focusing on a long-standing challenge for syntactic theory: syntactic islands. Extraction from coordinated verb phrases is often degraded, yet…
With the rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs), it becomes increasingly important to understand their abilities and limitations. In two experiments, we investigate the causal and compositional reasoning abilities of LLMs and humans…
Rigorous evaluation of the causal effects of semantic features on language model predictions can be hard to achieve for natural language reasoning problems. However, this is such a desirable form of analysis from both an interpretability…
Rigorous evaluation of the causal effects of semantic features on language model predictions can be hard to achieve for natural language reasoning problems. However, this is such a desirable form of analysis from both an interpretability…
Causal inference has shown potential in enhancing the predictive accuracy, fairness, robustness, and explainability of Natural Language Processing (NLP) models by capturing causal relationships among variables. The emergence of generative…
Causality is essential for understanding complex systems, such as the economy, the brain, and the climate. Constructing causal graphs often relies on either data-driven or expert-driven approaches, both fraught with challenges. The former…
Causal inference has been a pivotal challenge across diverse domains such as medicine and economics, demanding a complicated integration of human knowledge, mathematical reasoning, and data mining capabilities. Recent advancements in…
We present a mechanistic interpretability study of GPT-2 that causally examines how sentiment information is processed across its transformer layers. Using systematic activation patching across all 12 layers, we test the hypothesized…
Transformer-based language models have achieved significant success; however, their internal mechanisms remain largely opaque due to the complexity of non-linear interactions and high-dimensional operations. While previous studies have…
Causal reasoning capability is critical in advancing large language models (LLMs) toward strong artificial intelligence. While versatile LLMs appear to have demonstrated capabilities in understanding contextual causality and providing…