arXiv Machine Learning

Benchmarking and Enhancing Agentic Causal Discovery

The paper introduces Heuresis, a benchmark of anonymous simulated datasets spanning linear Gaussian to heavy-tailed mechanisms, designed to evaluate how well LLM agents can perform causal discovery and improve upon existing algorithms. The benchmark tracks algorithmic gains versus data‑driven insights and records every edge an agent modifies. Using this benchmark, GPT‑6.1 Sol and Claude Opus 5.5 outperform the best existing algorithms on all six dataset families, with GPT‑6.1 Sol achieving a 14% adjacency F1 improvement on the hardest family.

arXiv AI
Oct 5

Mapping and Advancing the Scalability-Accuracy Frontier of Nonlinear Causal Discovery

The paper evaluates four main approaches to scalable nonlinear causal discovery—differentiable, amortized, score‑matching, and combinatorial search—highlighting their distinct accuracy‑runtime trade‑offs. It introduces SPADE, a spline‑based score‑evaluation method that compiles and reuses sufficient statistics, reducing combinatorial search complexity from O(nd³) to O(nd²+d³). Empirical results show SPADE dramatically extends the scalability‑accuracy frontier, solving large‑scale problems with high structural accuracy on both synthetic and real‑world data.

By Hendrik Suhr, Sascha Xu, Jilles Vreeken
arXiv AI
Jun 3

CauTion: Knowing When to Trust LLMs for Ensemble Causal Discovery

arXiv:2606. 03602v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal discovery from observational data remains challenging due to the fundamental limitations of purely statistical methods, such as statistical distinguishability within equivalence classes and sensitivity to finite sample sizes.

By Bo Peng, Kaiwen Wu, Sirui Chen, Zhiheng Wang, Yu Qiao, Chaochao Lu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

CausalArena: Benchmarking Causal Discovery in the Foundation Model Era

CausalArena is a new benchmark designed to evaluate causal discovery methods in the era of foundation models. It unifies synthetic structural causal models (SCMs), semantically grounded SCMs, and formula‑grounded SCMs, while also including real‑world datasets for external validation. Experiments show that performance rankings vary widely across different SCM families and protocols, indicating that strong results on one benchmark do not necessarily transfer to others.

By Zi-Rong Li, Si-Yang Liu, Tian-Zuo Wang, Han-Jia Ye
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

GoT-CD: Graph-of-Thoughts Causal Discovery and the Fragility of Post-hoc Path-Specific Fairness Audits

arXiv:2608. 02877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal discovery recovers directed structure from observational data and is increasingly used in clinical settings to support mechanism reasoning and fairness audits of predictive models.

By Nitish Nagesh, Elahe Khatibi, Thomas Dean Hughes, Mahdi Bagheri, Pratik Gajane, Amir M. Rahmani
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Optimal Experiments for Partial Causal Effect Identification

The paper tackles selecting a cost‑constrained set of experiments that most effectively tighten bounds on a partially identifiable causal query. It formalizes this as the NP‑hard max‑potency problem, introduces efficient graphical pruning rules to reduce the search space, and demonstrates the approach on synthetic graphs and real NHANES data to estimate the effect of physical activity on diabetes.

By Tobias Maringgele, Jalal Etesami
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 10

CausalArena: Benchmarking Causal Discovery in the Foundation Model Era

CausalArena is a unified, evolvable benchmark designed to evaluate causal discovery methods across diverse structural causal models (SCMs). It incorporates synthetic SCMs for controlled structural variation, semantic operational SCMs for human-auditable environments, and formula-grounded SCMs to test discovery under explicit scientific mechanisms, along with real-world datasets for external validity. Experiments show that performance rankings vary significantly across SCM families and protocols, indicating that strong results on one benchmark do not generalize to others, especially in the context of causal discovery foundation models.