cs.LGAug 4, 2026

GENESIS: Towards Explainable Causal Discovery

Authors: Abhinav ThoratRavi Kumar KollaVishak K BhatHarsh Vardhan Singh ChauhanNiranjan Pedanekar

Organizations: User Engagement Research, Sony Research India

Abstract

Causal Discovery (CD) from observational data faces two fundamental challenges. First, purely statistical methods often lack the power to resolve structural ambiguities in low-sample regimes. Second, although LLM-assisted hybrid approaches improve structure recovery through semantic reasoning, the influence of that reasoning on individual edge decisions remains largely opaque. Consequently, existing hybrid methods fail to satisfy a fundamental requirement: explaining why a particular edge is included or excluded in the learned directed acyclic graph (DAG). This is critical in real-world applications, where no ground-truth DAG exists and every structural decision must be independently justified. We formalize this requirement as decision traceability, requiring every inferred edge to be supported by auditable statistical evidence, Markov Blanket consistency, or explicit domain reasoning. We propose GENESIS, an explainable hybrid CD framework that decomposes graph construction into interpretable decision points. GENESIS first identifies and scores three-node structural motifs, including chains, forks, and colliders, to establish transparent structural priors, then progressively refines the graph by integrating these priors with observational evidence, invoking domain knowledge only when statistical evidence is insufficient. By design, every edge decision is resolved through an auditable source of evidence. Experiments show that GENESIS achieves 100% decision traceability across all settings, establishing explainability as a first-class objective in causal discovery. Despite this additional requirement, GENESIS consistently outperforms purely statistical CD methods on the majority of benchmark datasets across all sample regimes in terms of Structural Hamming Distance (SHD), while achieving performance comparable to state-of-the-art LLM-assisted approaches.

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. FoundCause: Causal Discovery with Latent Confounders from Observational Data

    Jun 16, 2026Patrick Blöbaum, Krishnakumar Balasubramanian, Shiva Prasad KasiviswanathanCausal Foundation ModelsStructural Causal Model

  2. Decoupled Causal Discovery

    Sep 20, 2026Zhengkang Guan, Fei Wu, Kun KuangCausal Foundation ModelsFalse Discovery Rate