arXiv AI

When Do Causal World Models Help Modular LLM Agents

The paper introduces FedCausalCompose, a causal world‑model framework designed for modular large‑language‑model agents that interact with distinct services such as order, payment, inventory, and shipment. It demonstrates that standard observational world models suffer from irreducible interventional errors when unblocked back‑door paths exist, whereas incorporating intervention‑response evidence improves interface recovery and can outperform non‑causal baselines when coverage and local mechanism errors are controlled. Experiments show that causal interfaces are most beneficial in structured tool environments with clear API signatures, while they provide little advantage in dialogue or narrative settings unless the causal information becomes directly relevant to the agent’s decision making.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 25

OpenRCA 2.0: From Outcome Labels to Causal Process Supervision

Root cause analysis (RCA) poses a holistic test of LLM agentic capabilities, such as long-context understanding, multi-step reasoning, and tool use. However, existing datasets suffer from a fundamental gap: they label only the root cause, not the propagation path connecting it to the observed symptom, which largely simplifies the task to naive pattern matching.

arXiv AI
2d ago

When Harnesses Lose the Signal: Causal Evaluation of Recovery in LLM Agents

Large language model agents depend on external harnesses to exchange information with their environment and to recover from execution errors, but recovery is typically evaluated only by overall task success, masking a key trade‑off. The authors treat recovery as a causal decision problem, comparing outcomes with and without recovery from the same execution state to separate rescue from harm and analyze how its value evolves over time. They propose the Causal Intervention Router (CIR), a lightweight policy that uses pre‑recovery information to decide when intervention is beneficial, achieving a 3‑point increase in success on long‑horizon ALFWorld tasks with Qwen3‑14B while preserving correct observations and demonstrating that recovery’s benefit is not solely due to new observations.

By Shuyao Xiao, Shengling Wang, Xuan Chen, Ke Chao, Ming Cui, Feifei Qian, Chaoyang Mei, Fanlin Meng, Ziming Yu, Junxi Yin
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Symbolic Temporal Supervision of LLM Agents Using Contracts

ContrAgent is a contract‑based framework that provides symbolic temporal supervision for large language model agents. It records an agent’s tool‑call sequence as a trace of checkable predicates and formalizes desired behaviors with assume‑guarantee contracts expressed in linear temporal logic over finite traces (LTLf). Each contract is compiled into a deterministic finite automaton that both gates actions online and evaluates recorded traces offline, enabling deterministic, reproducible verdicts and significantly lower per‑call latency compared to existing LLM‑judge and rule‑based guardrail baselines.

By Yifeng Xiao, Pierluigi Nuzzo
arXiv AI
Sep 7

DCFA: Dual-view Causal-inspired Attribution for Failure Reasoning in LLM-based Multi-agent Systems

The paper introduces DCFA, a training‑free framework for attributing failures in large language model‑based multi‑agent systems. DCFA uses a global module to build causal‑inspired dependency graphs from system traces, pinpointing the earliest decisive error, and a local module that refines this attribution through counterfactual reasoning. Experiments on the Who&When benchmark across six LLMs demonstrate that DCFA improves step‑level accuracy by up to 8.27% over existing baselines.

By Zehao Wang, Lanjun Wang, Shilong Jin, Junjie Chen, Yanghua Xiao
arXiv AI
Aug 11

TempoBench: Reasoning Execution Without Causal Attribution Is Just Simulation

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.

By Nikolaus Holzer, William Fishell, Baishakhi Ray, Mark Santolucito