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
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:2609.36881v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Causal foundation models (CFMs) pre-trained on data generated from various structural causal models (SCMs) have been proposed for estimating causal eff...
By Heejin Jung, Gyeongdeok Seo, Hoyoon Byun, Joseph Lee, Kyungwoo Song
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: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
CausalProfiler is a synthetic benchmark generator designed to evaluate causal machine learning (Causal ML) methods more rigorously and transparently. It randomly samples causal models, data, queries, and ground truths based on explicit design choices across observation, intervention, and counterfactual reasoning levels, providing coverage guarantees and transparent assumptions. The authors demonstrate its utility by testing several state‑of‑the‑art methods under diverse conditions, both within and outside the identification regime, highlighting the insights CausalProfiler can reveal.
By Panayiotis Panayiotou, Audrey Poinsot, Alessandro Leite, Nicolas Chesneau, Marc Schoenauer, \"Ozg\"ur \c{S}im\c{s}ek
arXiv:2603. 02204v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Selective conformal prediction can yield substantially tighter uncertainty sets when we can identify calibration examples that are exchangeable with the test example.
By Amir Asiaee, Kavey Aryan, James P. Long
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:2603. 10254v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Synthetic tabular data generation addresses data scarcity and privacy constraints in a variety of domains.
By Davide Tugnoli, Andrea De Lorenzo, Marco Virgolin, Giovanni Cin\`a
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: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: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.
By Jie Qiao, Ruichu Cai, Zijian Li, Weilin Chen, Pengfei Hua, Boyan Xu, Zhengming Chen, Zhifeng Hao, Peng Cui