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.
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
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
The paper introduces Cluster-DAGs as a flexible prior knowledge framework to improve causal discovery. It presents two modified constraint‑based algorithms, Cluster‑PC and Cluster‑FCI, tailored for fully and partially observed data. Experiments on simulated data show that these methods outperform baseline algorithms that lack prior knowledge.
By Jan Marco Ruiz de Vargas, Kirtan Padh, Niki Kilbertus
arXiv:2609.39406v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Causal AI is a branch of Artificial Intelligence which helps understand and reason about cause and effect relationships, not just patterns or correlati...
By Nishchal Prasad, Eric Gaussier, Emilie Devijver, Alexander Obeid Guzman, Armen Aghasaryan, Gregor G\"ossler