arXiv:2606. 31630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models increasingly write probabilistic programs (in NumPyro, Stan, or Pyro), but a program that compiles, runs, and passes every unit test can still be \emph{statistically} wrong -- a Gaussian likelihood for heavy-tailed data, a Poisson for over-dispersed counts, an invalid prior support, or a pathological parameterization.
By Jian Xu, Delu Zeng, John Paisley, Qibin Zhao
CaSKG introduces a counterfactual‑causal skill graph framework that calibrates procedural relations before retrieval, building a high‑recall directed candidate graph from semantic, lexical, input/output, and structural evidence and refining it with repair evidence and optional LLM judgment. The framework applies direction‑conditioned textual counterfactual probes—removing, substituting, and reordering skill pairs—to aggregate evidence with Bayesian smoothing, producing a state‑filtered weighted graph for task‑conditioned expansion. Evaluated across six LLM backbones on ALFWorld and ScienceWorld, CaSKG outperforms existing Graph‑of‑Skills methods, improving macro‑average scores and reducing mean environment steps while preserving essential skill dependencies.
By Zhiyuan Li, Linyuan Gao, Xuechun Ding, Hongwei Chen, Yuan Wu, Yi Chang
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.
By Amit Kumar, Elnur Adl Zarabi, Suranjana Trivedy, Zhiqian Chen, Lei Zhang, Kaiqun Fu, Taoran Ji
arXiv:2608. 03506v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-consistency assumes the most frequent answer among sampled reasoning traces is the most reliable, but this can fail in causal reasoning: samples often repeat the same confounding error, and votes fragment across multiple valid answers, letting an invalid answer win despite a valid minority trace.
By Omatharv Bharat Vaidya, Connor Thomas Jerzak, Zayne Rea Sprague, Fangcong Yin, Nhat Ho
arXiv:2608. 14617v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A recurring proposal in legal AI is to improve case-outcome prediction by fusing uncertainty tools (evidence graphs with belief propagation, sequential Bayesian odds updating, Dempster-Shafer combination, and conformal prediction) into one pipeline.
By Surya Saka
BLADE is a variational model for knowledge graph completion that separates latent truth from graph recording and uses distilled offline language‑model judgments as a frozen teacher regularizer. The model provides calibrated probabilities and epistemic uncertainty through posterior samples, while the teacher is only an optional triage factor during inference. Across five benchmarks, BLADE matches ranking performance and significantly reduces expected calibration error, improving ECE, Brier score, and NLL over several baselines, and shows strong performance under controlled missingness and leakage stress tests.
By Ibne Farabi Shihab, Rabeya Bosri Tamanna, Abdo El Karaky, Sanjeda Akter, Anuj Sharma
Self-consistency assumes the most frequent answer among sampled reasoning traces is the most reliable, but this can fail in causal reasoning: samples often repeat the same confounding error, and votes fragment across multiple valid answers, letting an invalid answer win despite a valid minority trace. We introduce CALVER (Causal Axiom-Level VERification), a training-free symbolic verifier that scores structured traces against Pearl's causal criteria, including -separation, backdoor adjustment, and intervention, and selects the highest-scoring candidate without consulting a reference answer.
arXiv:2606. 01682v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Selecting the best response from multiple small-model samples using a stronger scorer is a simple inference-time strategy, but fails when the small model has already committed to incorrect reasoning paths.
By Atoosa Chegini, Soheil Feizi
arXiv:2608. 12585v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Improving reasoning LLMs requires the ability to judge the quality of long reasoning traces for effective reasoning data curation, strong training signals during reinforcement learning, and an in-depth understanding of reasoning behaviors during model performance evaluation.
By Congchao Wang, Diwakar Singh, Qiaozi Gao, Spyros Matsoukas, Yang Liu, Mahdi Namazifar
The paper introduces CERTID, a formal identification pipeline that uses the sound and complete causal identification algorithm ID to certify whether a causal effect is identifiable from a given graph and query. CERTID also verifies returned formulas against structural causal models with known interventional distributions, mitigating structural leakage and providing grading guarantees. The authors evaluate three frontier reasoning models on 1,200 certified instances, finding that accuracy is a poor proxy for soundness, with false-claim rates on non-identifiable queries varying by seventeen-fold across models.
By Arman Behnam, Binghui Wang
Selecting the best response from multiple small-model samples using a stronger scorer is a simple inference-time strategy, but fails when the small model has already committed to incorrect reasoning paths. PRM guided search avoids this by scoring candidate continuations during generation, but requires a reward model trained with step-level labels.
arXiv:2604. 24827v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Closed-source frontier labs do not disclose parameter counts.
By Bojie Li