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.
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:2605. 02640v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As artificial intelligence (AI), including machine learning (ML) models and foundation models (FMs), are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains, ensuring their trustworthiness has become a central challenge.
By Ruta Binkyte, Ivaxi Sheth, Zhijing Jin, Mohammad Havaei, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Mario Fritz
arXiv:2609.17238v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: High-dimensional data create challenges for causal effect estimation because identifying the covariates needed for correct model specification become...
By Muwon Kwon, Peter M. Steiner
The paper introduces Probabilistic Causal Impact (PCI), a framework that blends actual causality (AC) with Pearl’s probability of necessity and sufficiency to provide tractable, causally grounded explanations. PCI reframes explainability as an estimation problem on a probabilistic causal model, enabling efficient approximation via Monte Carlo sampling. The authors evaluate PCI on synthetic and real-world data, demonstrating consistency with AC, scalability, and applicability to complex continuous systems and large-scale causal machine learning models.
By Rafal Urbaniak, Sam Witty, Daniel Waxman, Andy Zane, Poorva Garg, Emily Bunnapradist, Sankaran Vaidyanathan, Jack Feser, Drew Lehe, Eli Bingham