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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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:2610.00968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal representation learning aims to discover robust features by exploiting the causal structure underlying data generation. Existing methods requi...
arXiv:2606. 18011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Constraint-based causal discovery relies on repeated conditional independence tests, but fast nonparametric tests often sacrifice calibration, especially when variables depend on the conditioning set through nonlinear relationships.
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.
arXiv:2606. 10607v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal discovery aims to uncover causal structures from observational data, which is crucial for real-world decision-making.
arXiv:2609.30643v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider the problem of learning the underlying causal directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure corresponding to a structural equation model (SEM) wit...
arXiv:2607. 11508v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal discovery, the process of recovering underlying causal structures from observational data, is a fundamental pursuit across scientific disciplines.