Large language models (LLMs) increasingly act as integrated data-science agents, combining abstract reasoning with advanced tool use. Yet the relevant benchmark landscape largely divides into symbolic causal reasoning benchmarks without realistic data analysis or data analysis benchmarks without a principled causal data-generating structure.
arXiv:2510. 27544v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Current training paradigms, optimized for long-horizon reasoning trace execution, have made Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at pattern matching and forward simulation of reasoning, but underperform at counterfactual causal understanding and reasoning.
By Nikolaus Holzer, William Fishell, Baishakhi Ray, Mark Santolucito
arXiv:2602. 20094v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: 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.
By Yuzhe Wang, Yaochen Zhu, Jundong Li
TabCausal is a causal discovery foundation model that learns to map datasets directly to causal graphs by pretraining across diverse causal environments. It uses a dynamic task construction strategy to expose the model to varied graph priors, mechanisms, noise models, dimensions, sample sizes, and intervention regimes, improving transferability from observational and mixed‑interventional data. On large synthetic benchmarks and a new protocol‑guided semantic benchmark, TabCausal outperforms many classical baselines and shows robust structure recovery, especially when interventional evidence is available.
By Zi-Rong Li, Si-Yang Liu, Tian-Zuo Wang, Han-Jia Ye
arXiv:2606. 16603v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in data-intensive analytical tasks, yet their outputs are rarely verifiable: a reliance on linear text trajectories makes their reasoning difficult to audit.
By Jiajie Jin, Zhao Yang, Wenle Liao, Yuyang Hu, Guanting Dong, Xiaoxi Li, Yutao Zhu, Zhicheng Dou
arXiv:2607. 04293v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Building AI Scientist agents with Large Language Models (LLMs) has recently attracted growing attention.
By Zhenhao Chen, Yongqiang Chen, Chenxi Liu, Junchi Yu, Xiangchen Song, Zijian Li, Jialin Li, Philip Torr, Bo Han, Kun Zhang
arXiv:2510. 27544v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Temporal reasoning involves understanding how systems evolve over time through input-driven state transitions.
By Nikolaus Holzer, William Fishell, Baishakhi Ray, Mark Santolucito
arXiv:2604. 08477v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has substantially improved reasoning in formal domains such as mathematics and code, but extending these gains beyond STEM remains challenging.
By Ashima Suvarna, Kendrick Phan, Mehrab Beikzadeh, Hritik Bansal, Saadia Gabriel
arXiv:2509. 03059v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown that their reasoning capabilities can be significantly improved through Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR), particularly in domains like mathematics and programming, where ground-truth correctness can be automatically evaluated.
By Xingyue Huang, Rishabh, Gregor Franke, Ziyi Yang, Jiamu Bai, Weijie Bai, Jinhe Bi, Zifeng Ding, Yiqun Duan, Chengyu Fan, Wendong Fan, Xin Gao, Ruohao Guo, Yuan He, Zhuangzhuang He, Xianglong Hu, Neil Johnson, Bowen Li, Fangru Lin, Siyu Lin, Tong Liu, Yunpu Ma, Hao Shen, Hao Sun, Beibei Wang, Fangyijie Wang, Hao Wang, Haoran Wang, Yang Wang, Yifeng Wang, Zhaowei Wang, Ziyang Wang, Yifan Wu, Zikai Xiao, Chengxing Xie, Fan Yang, Junxiao Yang, Qianshuo Ye, Ziyu Ye, Guangtao Zeng, Yuwen Ebony Zhang, Zeyu Zhang, Zihao Zhu, Bernard Ghanem, Philip Torr, Guohao Li
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
Scientific datasets are commonly organized as hierarchical repositories containing heterogeneous and interdependent files, making their inspection, integration, and analysis labor-intensive and reliant on domain expertise. Although large language model (LLM) agents have advanced substantially in planning, reasoning, and tool use, existing research has largely overlooked their ability to interact with real scientific data assets through executable environments.
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.