arXiv Machine Learning

CausalArena: Benchmarking Causal Discovery in the Foundation Model Era

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.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 10

CausalArena: Benchmarking Causal Discovery in the Foundation Model Era

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 Machine Learning
Aug 19

TabCausal: Pretraining Across Causal Environments for Tabular Causal Discovery

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 AI
Jul 14

CDFM: Towards a General-Purpose Causal Discovery Foundation Model

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 Machine Learning
Oct 2

CIDER-FM: Foundation Models for Causal Inference from Diverse Experimental Regimes

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 AI
Oct 5

Mapping and Advancing the Scalability-Accuracy Frontier of Nonlinear Causal Discovery

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.

By Hendrik Suhr, Sascha Xu, Jilles Vreeken
arXiv AI
Aug 20

CausalProfiler: Generating Synthetic Benchmarks for Rigorous and Transparent Evaluation of Causal Machine Learning

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 Machine Learning
Jun 19

Unsupervised Causal Abstractions Discovery

arXiv:2606. 19594v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal abstractions formalize when a high-level structural causal model (SCM) captures the interventional behavior of a lower-level SCM.

By Th\'eo Saulus, Simon Lacoste-Julien, Dhanya Sridhar
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

DAG-FM: A Foundation Model for Causal Discovery under Heterogeneous Causal Mechanisms

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).

By Yikang Chen, Zhengkang Guan, Haoyuan Qian, Peng Cui, Yi Yang, Kun Kuang