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
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:2607. 19866v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discovering the direct causes and effects of a target variable from observational data is a fundamental problem in causal discovery, with broad applications in domains such as gene regulatory analysis and biomedical research.
By Zheng Li, Hao Zhang, Ruxin Wang, Ruichu Cai, Kun Zhang, Feng Xie
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.
arXiv:2606. 17516v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal discovery from observational data remains challenging due to the need to recover directed structure and latent confounding without interventions.
By Patrick Bl\"obaum, Krishnakumar Balasubramanian, Shiva Prasad Kasiviswanathan
arXiv:2606. 23741v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal reasoning, which encompasses the discovery of causal structures and the inference of causal effects, is fundamental to data-driven decision making.
By Xianjie Guo, Yuwei Wang, Guodu Xiang, Xiaoli Tang, Kui Yu, Han Yu, Qiang Yang
Discovering the direct causes and effects of a target variable from observational data is a fundamental problem in causal discovery, with broad applications in domains such as gene regulatory analysis and biomedical research. Existing causal discovery methods either learn a global causal structure, which incurs substantial computational cost, or assume the absence of latent variables and selection bias, assumptions that are often violated in real-world settings.
arXiv:2607. 11510v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal discovery from observational tabular data remains fundamentally challenging, primarily due to the heterogeneity of underlying causal mechanisms and the high-dimensional combinatorial search space of Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs).
By Yikang Chen, Zhengkang Guan, Haoyuan Qian, Peng Cui, Yi Yang, Kun Kuang
arXiv:2608. 03868v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal Discovery (CD) from observational data faces two fundamental challenges.
By Abhinav Thorat, Ravi Kumar Kolla, Vishak K Bhat, Harsh Vardhan Singh Chauhan, Niranjan Pedanekar
arXiv:2602. 14972v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Estimating causal quantities traditionally relies on bespoke estimators tailored to specific assumptions.
By Arik Reuter, Anish Dhir, Cristiana Diaconu, Jake Robertson, Ole Ossen, Frank Hutter, Adrian Weller, Mark van der Wilk, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf
CIDER-FM is a causal foundation model that combines finite observational data with surrogate-interventional datasets to predict target conditional interventional distributions more accurately than using observational data alone. It employs an intervention-aware representation and hierarchical three‑axis attention to integrate information across variables, samples, and experimental regimes. Experiments on synthetic graphs, simulated data, and real‑world Causal Chambers data show that incorporating experimental context improves CID prediction performance.
By Yuche Gao, Arik Reuter, Siyuan Guo, Anish Dhir, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Adrian Weller
arXiv:2510. 22298v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Uncovering the causal mechanisms of complex real-world systems remains a significant challenge, as these systems often entail high data collection costs and involve unknown interventions.
By Hans Jarett Ong, Yoichi Chikahara, Tomoharu Iwata