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CausalBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Causal Learning Capability of LLMs

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arxiv 2404.06349 v2 pith:NMAIHHXS submitted 2024-04-09 cs.LG

CausalBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Causal Learning Capability of LLMs

classification cs.LG
keywords llmscausalcausalitycausalbenchcomprehensivedatalearningability
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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The ability to understand causality significantly impacts the competence of large language models (LLMs) in output explanation and counterfactual reasoning, as causality reveals the underlying data distribution. However, the lack of a comprehensive benchmark currently limits the evaluation of LLMs' causal learning capabilities. To fill this gap, this paper develops CausalBench based on data from the causal research community, enabling comparative evaluations of LLMs against traditional causal learning algorithms. To provide a comprehensive investigation, we offer three tasks of varying difficulties, including correlation, causal skeleton, and causality identification. Evaluations of 19 leading LLMs reveal that, while closed-source LLMs show potential for simple causal relationships, they significantly lag behind traditional algorithms on larger-scale networks ($>50$ nodes). Specifically, LLMs struggle with collider structures but excel at chain structures, especially at long-chain causality analogous to Chains-of-Thought techniques. This supports the current prompt approaches while suggesting directions to enhance LLMs' causal reasoning capability. Furthermore, CausalBench incorporates background knowledge and training data into prompts to thoroughly unlock LLMs' text-comprehension ability during evaluation, whose findings indicate that, LLM understand causality through semantic associations with distinct entities, rather than directly from contextual information or numerical distributions.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

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    CausalDS generates SCM-grounded scenes with free-form stories and noisy observations to jointly score causal reasoning, coding, uncertainty, and abstention in data-science agents.

  2. Reasoning over Video: Evaluating How MLLMs Extract, Integrate, and Reconstruct Spatiotemporal Evidence

    cs.CV 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    VAEX-BENCH shows state-of-the-art MLLMs perform substantially worse on abstractive spatiotemporal reasoning tasks than on matched extractive tasks in video understanding.

  3. CausalReasoningBenchmark: A Real-World Benchmark for Disentangled Evaluation of Causal Identification and Estimation

    cs.AI 2026-02 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    CausalReasoningBenchmark supplies 173 real-world queries that separately grade causal identification specifications and point estimates to expose distinct failure modes in automated causal systems.

  4. Caliper: Probing Lexical Anchors versus Causal Structure in LLMs

    cs.CL 2026-06 conditional novelty 6.0

    Lexical anonymization via Caliper causes consistent accuracy drops of 7-30 percentage points across LLMs on causal benchmarks, indicating reliance on lexical anchors rather than structural causal reasoning.

  5. CAARL: In-Context Learning for Interpretable Co-Evolving Time Series Forecasting

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    CAARL decomposes co-evolving time series into autoregressive segments, builds a temporal dependency graph, serializes it into a narrative, and uses LLMs for interpretable forecasting via chain-of-thought reasoning.

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    QM-ToT applies Tree of Thoughts decomposition and evaluator layers to quantized LLMs, reporting accuracy gains from 34% to 50% on MedQAUSMLE for LLaMA2-70b and from 58.77% to 69.49% for LLaMA-3.1-8b, plus an 86.27% im...