Causal Foundation Models (CFMs) are pretrained neural networks designed to estimate causal quantities—such as the average treatment effect—across new datasets using in‑context learning, eliminating the need for bespoke pipelines or model updates. The paper introduces CFMs, reviews foundational concepts in causal inference and machine learning, and provides practical code examples and Jupyter notebooks to illustrate their application.
By Christopher Stith, Hossein Rahmani, Jesse C. Cresswell
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
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
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. 18662v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Causal discovery for both cross-sectional and temporal data has traditionally followed a dataset-specific paradigm, where a new model is fitted for each individual dataset.
By Nikolaos Kougioulis, Nikolaos Gkorgkolis, MingXue Wang, Bora Caglayan, Dario Simionato, Andrea Tonon, Ioannis Tsamardinos
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
arXiv:2606. 03332v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Probabilistic models are typically trained using task-agnostic objectives like log-loss, which can lead to significant errors in downstream estimation.
By Roman Plaud, Alexandre Perez-Lebel, Antoine Saillenfest, Thomas Bonald, Marine Le Morvan, Ga\"el Varoquaux, Matthieu Labeau
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:2604. 23107v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Causal effect estimation from observational data requires careful adjustment for confounding.
By Lei Wang, Debashis Ghosh
arXiv:2602. 06337v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Causal inference is essential for decision-making but remains challenging for non-experts.
By Junqi Chen, Sirui Chen, Chaochao Lu
arXiv:2609.06941v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Causal effect estimation asks how an outcome would change under an intervention, and medicine, economics, and public policy all treat it as a foundatio...
By Haohao Zhou
arXiv:2606. 05797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Longitudinal treatment decisions require predicting potential outcomes under future treatment sequences in the presence of time-varying confounding, heterogeneous patient dynamics, and limited domain-specific data.
By Amirhossein Zare, Amirhessam Zare, Herlock Rahimi, Reza Salarikia, Mohammad Kashkooli