Can Post-Training Transform LLMs into Causal Reasoners?
arXiv:2602. 06337v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Causal inference is essential for decision-making but remains challenging for non-experts.
The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) truly perform formal causal reasoning by testing them on datasets generated by the CLadder framework. It finds that LLMs and even simple models like random forests can achieve high accuracy on CLadder data, largely due to superficial, highly predictive patterns embedded by the generator. The authors argue that strong performance on CLadder likely reflects exploitation of these patterns rather than genuine causal reasoning, and that many commercial LLMs show brittle results when critical text is removed.
arXiv:2602. 06337v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Causal inference is essential for decision-making but remains challenging for non-experts.
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.
arXiv:2404.06349v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The ability to understand causality significantly impacts the competence of large language models (LLMs) in output explanation and counterfactual r...
arXiv:2510. 27544v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Temporal reasoning involves understanding how systems evolve over time through input-driven state transitions.
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:2607. 08093v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly act as integrated data-science agents, combining abstract reasoning with advanced tool use.
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.
arXiv:2603. 05167v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges of chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet it remains unclear whether they can reliably assess process faithfulness rather than merely answer plausibility.
arXiv:2607. 04293v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Building AI Scientist agents with Large Language Models (LLMs) has recently attracted growing attention.
arXiv:2402.03941v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Revealing hidden causal variables alongside the underlying causal mechanisms is essential to the development of science. Despite the progress...
The study evaluates 12 instruction‑tuned open‑weight LLMs on six causal‑graph benchmarks, testing five prompting strategies and four confidence sources. Findings show that LLMs tend to over‑predict edges, misclassify indirect or reversed edges as direct, and exhibit high over‑confidence, while conventional confidence estimates are unreliable and agreement signals offer limited improvement. The results suggest LLMs should be used as externally validated soft causal priors rather than definitive causal‑structure evidence.
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.