arXiv AI By Amit Kumar, Elnur Adl Zarabi, Suranjana Trivedy, Zhiqian Chen, Lei Zhang, Kaiqun Fu, Taoran Ji

From Causal Plausibility to Causal Reliability: Evaluating LLMs as Calibrated Direct Causal-Edge Classifiers

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The study evaluates 12 instruction‑tuned open‑weight LLMs on six causal‑graph benchmarks, testing five prompting strategies and four confidence sources. Findings show that LLMs tend to over‑predict edges, misclassify indirect or reversed edges as direct, and exhibit high over‑confidence, while conventional confidence estimates are unreliable and agreement signals offer limited improvement. The results suggest LLMs should be used as externally validated soft causal priors rather than definitive causal‑structure evidence.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

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