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.
arXiv:2608. 02877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal discovery recovers directed structure from observational data and is increasingly used in clinical settings to support mechanism reasoning and fairness audits of predictive models.
By Nitish Nagesh, Elahe Khatibi, Thomas Dean Hughes, Mahdi Bagheri, Pratik Gajane, Amir M. Rahmani
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
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:2606. 06440v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data-driven causal relationship identification is pertinent to advancing understanding of complex systems both within and beyond science.
By Hazhir Aliahmadi, Irina Babayan, Greg van Anders