Causal Reasoning

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Causal reasoning asks what produces an outcome, what would change under an intervention, and why an event occurred. Researchers use structural causal models and graphs, discovery and effect-estimation methods, do-calculus, and counterfactual approaches to explanation and responsibility. Recent work also tests and builds language, vision, and agent systems using explicit causal graphs, reasoning traces, simulators, and interactive tasks. A central challenge is distinguishing genuine use of causal structure from reliance on familiar wording or correlations, while making assumptions and uncertainty explicit.

Latest papers

79 papers6 papers in the last four weeks, up 100% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Jun 21, 2026

Beyond Simpson's Paradox: A Cascade of Confounders in AI Agent Pull-Request Co-Authorship

Pooled across five AI coding agents, pull requests (PRs) with a human Co-Authored-By trailer merge less often than purely-autonomous ones (53.8% vs. 79.8%) -- yet this aggregate finding is a textbook Simpson's Paradox. Stratifying 33,596 PRs from the AIDev dataset by agent identity reverses the conclusion: Copilot and Devin show large positive within-agent gaps (+41.2 and +33.5 pp, both p<0.001), while Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex show small effects whose cross-sectional 95% CIs span zero. The paradox is driven entirely by agent composition: Codex, which dominates 64.9% of the dataset, achieves high merge rates while rarely using co-authorship. But Simpson's Paradox is only the first layer of a cascade of confounders: within-repo controls eliminate Devin's gap (+33.5 to +1.6 pp, p=0.73); a commit-count control further halves Copilot's within-repo gap (+36.2 to +24.4 pp); restricted to multi-commit PRs, the Copilot within-repo effect dissolves to +4.8 pp (p=0.59). No agent retains a clear co-authorship effect once both repository selection and PR structure are controlled. Our findings caution against reporting agent-pooled statistics without stratification and demonstrate that cross-sectional co-authorship associations are largely selection and PR-structure artefacts rather than evidence of a causal benefit.

Haoran Yu, Xiaochong Jiang, Lifei Liu +3

Independent Researcher Seattle, WA, USA · Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA, USA · Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA, USA

Software Engineering AI Coding Agents Causal Reasoning Human-AI Collaboration Mining Software Repositories

Jun 14, 2026

Faithful Action-unit Causal Reasoning for Counterfactually Faithful Emotion Explanations

Multimodal models can name the action units (AUs) behind a facial emotion, but their AU->emotion rationales are typically plausible rather than faithful: nothing forces the AUs a model invokes to be the AUs that actually drive its prediction. We cast AU->emotion reasoning as a counterfactual-consistency problem between the rationale, the label, and a structural AU->emotion causal graph G, and propose FACR, which grounds the reasoner in an independently induced, polarity-aware G and trains a counterfactual-faithfulness objective: a do-intervention on an AU that G marks causal for a class must move the prediction, while one it marks irrelevant must leave it unchanged. Faithfulness is thereby both trainable and measurable through a matching interventional metric, which we evaluate against a known causal structure, the PSPI pain-AU composition, as no existing affective-reasoning benchmark allows. We are explicit that this metric tests fidelity to the supplied structure rather than its rediscovery: it asks whether the trained reasoner invokes the AUs the structure marks causal, on held-out subjects and a second dataset. Under subject-independent evaluation on UNBC-PAIN, the objective raises the agreement between the invoked AUs and the PSPI composition from a no-objective baseline of 0.08 to 0.57, at a small detection cost; an unfaithfulness control attributes the gain to the objective. On a cross-dataset emotion transfer, the objective likewise raises fidelity to G on a seven-class task (0.50 to 0.84). Finally, we attach a language verbalizer and extend the audit to the generated text: biasing each action unit's emission by its latent activation makes the rationale faithful by construction, so that ablating an AU removes it from the explanation, a property that transfers to a second language-model backbone, whereas a freely generated rationale is unfaithful.

Van Thong Huynh, Hong Hai Nguyen, Thuy Pham +2

Faculty of CSE, Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HCMUT), VNUHCM, Vietnam · Dept. of AI, FPT University, Vietnam · Faculty of DSAI, College of Technology, National Economic University, Vietnam +1

Counterfactual Evaluation Counterfactual Explanations Causal Attribution Facial Expression Recognition Causal Reasoning Counterfactual Learning

Jun 11, 2026

Graphical Causal Reasoning for Root Cause Analysis in Cloud Networks

Cloud-computing relies on large-scale networks which are inherently complex systems. In this paper, we present a novel approach to root cause analysis (RCA) of cloud network incidents, leveraging graph-based causal discovery techniques. Our method addresses the limitations of rule-based automation by introducing a spatiotemporal grouping strategy and an automation ontology to reduce the dimensionality of the problem. We construct a causal graph from binary time series data using bivariate Granger causality and conditional independence tests. For inference, we introduce a probabilistic method that assigns edge-specific conditional probabilities as a function of time lag, allowing for interpretable, time-aware root cause scoring via causal graph traversal. We evaluated the system using a labeled dataset of 35 production incidents from a major cloud provider. The model successfully recalled the correct root cause in 85.7% of incidents and produced an exact match in 74.3%. In production, the deployed system has been used in over 800 real-world incidents, with positive qualitative feedback from network engineers. These results highlight the practicality of a data-driven, causal approach to RCA in dynamic and large-scale operational environments.

Fabien Chraim, Dominik Janzing, John Evans

Amazon Web Services

Time-Series Causal Discovery Cloud Computing Causal Reasoning Root Cause Analysis

Jun 11, 2026

WISE: A Long-Horizon Agent in Minecraft with Why-Which Reasoning

Rapid advances have been made in developing general-purpose embodied agent in environments like Minecraft through the adoption of LLM-augmented hierarchical approaches. Despite their promise, low-level controllers often become performance bottlenecks due to repeated execution failures. We argue that a key limitation is not only the lack of episodic memory, but also the decoupling of what-where-when memory from which-why reasoning. To address this, we propose WISE (Which-Why Informed Semantic Explorer), a long-horizon agent framework with an enhanced low-level controller equipped with a Causal Event Graph that augments episodic memory with explicit causal structure linking observations to task relevance. Unlike prior work such as MrSteve, which relies on feature similarity for retrieval, WISE enables robust recall under viewpoint changes and supports opportunistic task reordering through causal reasoning. Building on this memory, we propose an Opportunistic Task Scheduler that dynamically re-prioritizes subtasks when causally relevant opportunities are detected. We further equip WISE with a multi-scale progressive exploration strategy to provide spatially comprehensive observations for downstream reasoning. Experiments show that WISE largely improves task success and efficiency on long-horizon sparse tasks, particularly in settings requiring adaptive decision-making.

Renmin Cheng, Changhao Chen

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)

Causal Reasoning Long-Horizon Agent Tasks Long-Horizon LLM Agents Memory-Augmented Agents LLM Agent Planning Agentic AI

Jun 4, 2026

Human Adults and LLMs as Scientists: Who Benefits from Active Exploration?

A long-standing finding in the causal learning literature is that adults struggle to identify conjunctive causal rules, where an effect requires the simultaneous presence of multiple causes, while performing better in disjunctive settings. However, most demonstrations of this

conjunctive handicap'' rely on passive observation paradigms with limited evidence, where learners have no control over evidence generation. This paper asks whether this bias persists when adults are granted agency through active exploration. Using a modified

blicket detector'' task, adult participants freely intervened to identify causal objects under conjunctive or disjunctive rule structures. We show that active exploration substantially improves adults' conjunctive causal reasoning, although conjunctive rules still require more tests to infer than disjunctive rules. We further compare human performance to a range of large language models in the same setting. While some state-of-the-art models approach human-level performance on hypothesis inference accuracy, they often exhibit less efficient exploration strategies and similar conjunctive-disjunctive performance gaps.

Mandana Samiei, Eunice Yiu, Anthony GX-Chen +5

Mila - Quebec AI Institute · McGill University · University of California Berkeley +4

Cognitive Modeling Causal Reasoning Causal Inference

Jun 3, 2026

Caliper: Probing Lexical Anchors versus Causal Structure in LLMs

Large language models reach 50 to 70% accuracy on causal reasoning benchmarks such as CLadder, but it is unclear whether this reflects structural reasoning or lexical pattern matching. We introduce Caliper, a controlled perturbation that replaces semantic variable names with placeholder tokens while preserving the causal graph and probabilistic specification of each question. Across nine instruction-tuned LLMs from 3.8B to 671B and three causal reasoning benchmarks, lexical anonymization yields robust accuracy drops of +7.6, +27.0, and +11.1 pp on a local 3.8B-14B set, rising to +29.6 and +18.0 pp on CRASS and e-CARE across nine frontier models spanning the 2024-2026 generations. Of 40 engaged model-by-benchmark cells, 39 show a positive gap, and the gap collapses by 17x on CLadder's pseudoword subset. Structured scaffolding and few-shot in-context learning each narrow the gap, but mainly by lowering P0 accuracy on smaller models rather than recovering P1. Current instruction-tuned LLMs, evaluated zero-shot, show little evidence of structural causal reasoning once lexical anchors are removed.

Zhenyu Yu, Shuigeng Zhou

Fudan University

Shortcut Learning in Language Models Causal Reasoning in Language Models Causal Reasoning Causal Interventions in Language Models LLM Reasoning

Jun 2, 2026

Unveiling the Structure of Do-Calculus Reasoning via Derivation Graphs

The do-calculus defines a general system of inference for interventional queries, allowing causal quantities to be transformed through successive applications of its rules. This process induces a rich space of equivalent interventional expressions, but combining and ordering these rules remains challenging. In this work, we introduce derivation graphs, which represent how do-calculus rules are applied and combined, and characterize the full space of observational and interventional probabilities which are equivalent under the do-calculus. The structure of these graphs yields a simple procedure that uses at most four applications of do-calculus rules. Finally, we show how applying identification algorithms to equivalent causal queries produces multiple valid estimands for the same causal quantity, eventually yielding more efficient estimators.

Clément Yvernes, Emilie Devijver, Marianne Clausel +1

Univ Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble INP, LIG, France · Université de Lorraine, CNRS, CRAN, 54000 Nancy, France.

Causal Effect Estimation Causal Identifiability Causal Reasoning

May 29, 2026

Evaluating Bivariate Causal Statements Based on Mutual Compatibility

For many real-world systems, causal ground truth is difficult to obtain, making claims about causal effects hard to assess. We develop methods for evaluating collections of

\binom{n}{2}

bivariate causal statements over a set of

n

variables. In the setting of acyclic linear statements, any such collection can be extended to a unique multivariate causal model, but we argue that this induced model is implausible if it imposes substantial additional confounding to explain observed correlations. We introduce a compatibility score that quantifies this notion of plausibility, notably without relying on the faithfulness assumption. Additionally, we define an incompatibility score for purely graphical bivariate causal statements, based on global consistency constraints that are derived from acyclicity and faithfulness assumptions. We give theoretical and empirical evidence that both scores can successfully distinguish correct from incorrect causal statements in generic settings. Moreover, we demonstrate the practical applicability of our methods by analyzing causal claims made by large language models. Our work aims to provide a foundation for assessing the reliability of causal information derived from human experts or artificial intelligence in settings where alternative forms of validation are unavailable.

Erik Jahn, Dominik Janzing

1California Institute of Technology, USA · 2Amazon Research Tübingen, Germany

Structural Causal Models Causal Reasoning Causal Inference

May 27, 2026

BEAMS: Benchmarking and Evaluating AI for Modeling and Simulation

AI tools to support real world decision making must be able to build simulation models that inform their recommendations and render them interpretable. Tools that can automate aspects of modeling practice must complement human expertise, not replace it. The BEAMS Initiative aims to guide the development of AI tools for modeling and simulation toward forms that are responsible and ethical by establishing benchmarks for human centered modeling and simulation practices. The initiative uses open digital and organizational infrastructure to collaboratively evaluate AI tools for modeling and simulation. The open source sd ai project hosted by the initiative establishes transparency and enables contributions to be shared broadly. A steering group focuses on prioritizing potential benchmarks, while a technical group focuses on implementing the benchmarks in the form of automated tests. Tests for several distinct categories of evaluation have been implemented and applied to AI tools that support qualitative model building, quantitative model building, and model discussion. These include tests for causal translation, model iteration, causal reasoning, conformance, model behavior explanation, suggested model building steps, and suggested model fixes. When engines from the sd ai project are coupled with different LLMs, their performance on these evaluations reveals variability across different AI tools. The evaluations implemented by the initiative demonstrate that AI enabled modeling tools perform better at discussion and basic qualitative tasks than with causal reasoning and quantitative error fixing. No single LLM dominates across engine types, highlighting the importance of specific tasks and tradeoffs between speed and accuracy. Ongoing efforts of the initiative aim to incorporate benchmarks that address concerns about bias by considering alternative perspectives and human centered use cases.

Sara Metcalf, William Schoenberg

ISEE Systems

AI for Science Human-in-the-Loop AI Causal Reasoning Generative AI Evaluation

May 25, 2026

Causal Tongue-Tie: LLMs Can Encode Causal Direction, But Their Yes/No Outputs Fail to Express

We find a mismatch between what large language models encode about a causal question and what they answer. On anti-commonsense CLadder items, a fixed linear probe recovers the evidence-supported answer from the model's hidden state (accuracy approximately 0.97), while the spoken Yes/No reverts to the commonsense one (accuracy approximately 0.5). We call this approximately +0.5 gap Causal Tongue-Tie: a wrong Yes/No decomposes into two separable failure modes: no internal signal versus a signal the verbal interface cannot say. The implication cuts both ways for output-only causal benchmarks: a benchmark "correct" need not mean the model has understood, and a benchmark "wrong" need not mean it cannot. Sweeping claims about whether LLMs can do causal reasoning, drawn from a single accuracy number, deserve a second look.

Ziyi Ding, Xiao-Ping Zhang

Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University Shenzhen, China

LLM Evaluation Causal Reasoning in Language Models Causal Reasoning Causal Interpretability

May 24, 2026

Towards a Universal Causal Reasoner

Despite the importance of causal reasoning, training LLMs to reason causally remains underexplored. Existing data efforts mostly focus on benchmarking LLMs on specific aspects of causality, making them less suitable for training generalizable causal reasoners. To address this, we propose UniCo, a data generation framework that both (1) addresses 18 causal query types across Pearl's Causal Ladder and (2) translates natively symbolic examples into code and natural language forms to simulate real-world use cases where causal terms are not explicitly specified. To ensure data quality, UniCo grounds answers with exact causal inference and filters cases with reasoning shortcuts. Upon supervised finetuning with 66.6K UniCo-generated instances, Qwen3-4B, Qwen3-8B and Olmo-3-7B-Instruct achieve an average of 22.9% improvements across all 18 in-distribution query types, and 8.1% over state-of-the-art causal data generation frameworks on 7 established causal benchmarks outside the training distribution. More importantly, in real-world medical understanding, legal decision, and tabular reasoning, UniCo-trained models consistently display more faithful reasoning traces, outperforming the base models by an average of 20.2% in faithfulness metrics. These suggest that causality-centered training not only strengthens causal reasoning, but also equips LLMs with a causal mindset in general reasoning tasks.

Qirun Dai, Xiao Liu, Jiawei Zhang +3

1The University of Chicago · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Causal Reasoning in Language Models Causal Reasoning Causal Inference Synthetic Data Generation for Language Models

May 20, 2026

Causal Past Logic for Runtime Verification of Distributed LLM Agent Workflows

Distributed LLM agent workflows should not be monitored as if they produced a single sequential log. In an asynchronous execution, a decision can only depend on events that are causally visible to the lifeline that makes it: an event that appears earlier in some log may still be unknown locally. We extend the ZipperGen agent-workflow framework with Causal Past Logic (CPL), a small past-time temporal logic for guards in conditionals and while loops. In addition to standard past-time modalities such as previous and since, a guard can inspect the latest causally visible event of another lifeline and selected variables stored there. The formula is a source-level guard: it is evaluated online by the owner lifeline and can influence control flow at runtime. We give a vector-clock monitor with latest-value views and prove that the locally computed monitor value coincides with the denotational semantics of the guard at the current event. Thus runtime verification becomes part of the coordination language itself, rather than a post-hoc check over an execution log.

Benedikt Bollig

Universit´e Paris-Saclay, CNRS, ENS Paris-Saclay, LMF, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

LLM Agent Orchestration Agentic Workflows AI Agent Monitoring Causal Reasoning Runtime Verification

May 19, 2026

MixRea: Benchmarking Explicit-Implicit Reasoning in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into high-stakes decision-making. Inspired by the theory of inattentional blindness in human cognition, we investigate whether LLMs, trained on human-preferred corpora that embed attentional biases, exhibit a similar limitation: failing to attend to subtle yet important contextual cues under explicit task instructions. To evaluate this, we introduce the task of explicit-implicit reasoning and present MixRea, a benchmark of 2,246 multiple-choice questions across 9 reasoning types with varying distributions of explicit and implicit information. Evaluation of 21 advanced LLMs shows that even the best-performing reasoning model (Gemini 2.5 Pro) achieves only 42.8% consistency, revealing widespread inattentional blindness. To mitigate this, we propose Potential Relation Completion Prompting (PRCP), a prompting method that improves reasoning by recovering overlooked causal relations. Further analysis shows that this limitation persists across diverse multi-source reasoning tasks, highlighting the need for more cognitively aligned models.

Yuanqing Cai, Ziyi Huang, Minhao Liu +3

Shenzhen Institute for Advanced Study, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

LLM Evaluation LLM Prompting Causal Reasoning in Language Models Implicit Reasoning in Language Models Causal Reasoning

May 18, 2026

Causely: A Causal Intelligence Layer for Enterprise AI A Benchmark Study on SRE and Reliability Workflows

AI agents deployed into SRE workflows currently derive their understanding of environment state from raw observability telemetry at query time, paying a semantic-interpretation tax in tokens, latency, and inferential reliability. We propose Causely, a causal intelligence layer that maintains a structured representation of environment topology, attribute dependencies, and causal relationships that are anchroed to a ontological representation of the managed environment. Causely transforms raw telemetry into a live, queryable model providing the semantic and causal foundation AI agents require to diagnose, evaluate impact, and act safely in production. We evaluate this value proposition through a benchmark study conducted in a controlled setting with injected faults in a 24-microservice OpenTelemetry demo application. Our experiments compare four agent configurations (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, HolmesGPT with Sonnet and Gemini backends). Experiments are run with and without access to Causely under two scenarios: an active incident and a healthy baseline. On the active-fault scenario, causal grounding reduces mean time-to-diagnosis by 63%, mean token consumption by 60%, and mean tool-call count by 78%, compressing the investigation footprint by 4.8

\times

and lowering direct API cost per run by 57%; root-cause-diagnosis accuracy rises from 75% to 100%.

Dhairya Dalal, Endre Sara, Ben Yemini +2

Causely

Software Engineering AI Agent Benchmarks Causal Reasoning Root Cause Analysis LLM Agent Reliability Fault Diagnosis

May 13, 2026

Why We Need World Models for AGI: Where LLMs Fail and How World Models May Outperform

Large language models achieve strong performance in language generation and knowledge-intensive tasks, yet remain limited in settings requiring causal reasoning, persistent state tracking, and long-horizon planning. We argue that these limitations may arise from an objective-level mismatch between sequence prediction and reasoning over latent environment dynamics. To formalize this distinction, we introduce Latent Dynamics Inference (LDI), a conceptual perspective that interprets language and multimodal observations as partial evidence of underlying transition dynamics. To empirically investigate this perspective, we introduce Flux, a sequential reasoning environment specified entirely through natural-language rules. As a proof-of-concept case study, the rules are first compiled into an explicit state-transition simulator, illustrating that structured latent transition dynamics can, in some cases, be operationally extracted from textual rule descriptions. This enables a controlled comparison between the LLMs operating purely over textual observations and reinforcement-learning agents trained directly within the extracted latent state space. Within this case study, agents operating with explicit access to the latent state space exhibit substantially more stable behavior in long-horizon gameplay, achieving an aggregate win rate of approximately 79% versus 11% for LLMs. Qualitative analysis further reveals failure modes consistent with unstable persistent state tracking, including invalid actions, state-tracking errors, and short-horizon reasoning failures. The complete implementation of the Flux environment available at https://github.com/FeisalAlaswad/FLUX-RL-Agent Within the evaluated setting, these results suggest that strong sequence prediction alone may struggle to support robust long-horizon dynamic reasoning without mechanisms for persistent state tracking and transition modeling

Feisal Alaswad, Batoul Aljaddouh, Maher Alrahhal +2

Department of Computing Technologies SRM Institute of Science and Technology Kattankulathur 603203, Tamil Nadu, India · Bio-Sensing and Bio-Sensors Group Smart Automation and Communication Technologies Research Institute of Sciences and Engineering University of Sharjah, UAE · Department of Computer Engineering College of Computing and Informatics University of Sharjah, UAE

Latent Dynamics Modeling Long-Horizon Agent Evaluation Causal Reasoning in Language Models Causal Reasoning Latent World Models

May 13, 2026

Counterfactual Reasoning for Causal Responsibility Attribution in Probabilistic Multi-Agent Systems

Responsibility allocation -- determining the extent to which agents are accountable for outcomes -- is a fundamental challenge in the design and analysis of multi-agent systems. In this work, we model such systems as concurrent stochastic multi-player games and introduce a notion of retrospective (backward) counterfactual responsibility, which quantifies an agent's accountability for outcomes resulting from a given strategy profile. To allocate responsibility among agents, we utilise the Shapley value and formally show that this method satisfies key desirable properties, including fairness and consistency. Building on this foundation, we propose a formal framework that supports both verification and strategic reasoning in responsibility-aware multi-agent systems. Furthermore, by adopting Nash equilibrium as the solution concept, we demonstrate how to compute stable strategy profiles in which agents trade off responsibility against expected reward.

Chunyan Mu, Muhammad Najib

University of Aberdeen · Heriot-Watt University

Algorithmic Accountability Causal Attribution Multi-Agent Systems Causal Reasoning

May 13, 2026

CommonWhy: A Dataset for Evaluating Entity-Based Causal Commonsense Reasoning in Large Language Models

To effectively interact with the real world, Large Language Models (LLMs) require entity-based commonsense reasoning, a challenging task that necessitates integrating factual knowledge about specific entities with commonsense inference. Existing datasets for evaluating LLM entity-based commonsense reasoning have largely focused on True/False or multiple-choice questions, leaving the explicit assessment of the model's ability in abductive reasoning about causes and effects and generating explanations largely unexamined. In this work, we introduce CommonWhy, a dataset of 15,000 why questions designed to evaluate entity-based commonsense reasoning about causal relationships in LLMs. CommonWhy also serves as a Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) benchmark, as all supporting knowledge required to answer its queries is available in the Wikidata knowledge graph. Unlike existing KGQA datasets, which primarily test fact retrieval, CommonWhy targets causal commonsense reasoning, establishing a new paradigm for KGQA evaluation. Experiments with state-of-the-art LLMs and LLM-based KGQA methods reveal their significant shortcomings, including frequent factual hallucinations and failures in causal reasoning.

Armin Toroghi, Faeze Moradi Kalarde, Scott Sanner

University of Toronto · Toronto, ON, Canada

Abductive Reasoning Causal Reasoning in Language Models Causal Reasoning Knowledge Graph Question Answering LLM Reasoning

May 13, 2026

PROMETHEUS: Automating Deep Causal Research Integrating Text, Data and Models

Large language models can extract local causal claims from text, but those claims become more useful when organized as persistent, navigable world models rather than as flat summaries. We introduce PROMETHEUS, a framework that turns retrieved literature, filings, reviews, reports, agent traces, source data, code, simulations, and scientific models into causal atlases: sheaf-like families of local causal predictive-state models over an explicit cover of a research substrate. Each local region contains causal episodes, structured claim tables, predictive tests, support statistics, and provenance; restriction maps compare overlapping regions; gluing diagnostics expose agreement, drift, contradiction, and underdetermination. The resulting Topos World Model is not a single universal graph. It is a research instrument for navigating what a corpus says, where it says it, how strongly it is supported, and where local claims fail to assemble into a coherent global view. Three literature-atlas case studies -- ocean-temperature impacts on marine populations, GLP-1 weight-loss evidence, and resveratrol/red-wine health-benefit claims -- illustrate deep causal research from text with explicit locality, evidence, persistent state, and gluing tension. Four grounded-counterfactual case studies -- a Nature Climate Change microplastics forcing paper, an Indus Valley hydrology paper with VIC-derived figure data and model code, the canonical Sachs protein-signaling study with single-cell perturbation data, and a Nature singing-mouse study with MAPseq projection matrices -- show a stronger mode: when a paper ships source data, simulation outputs, or code, PROMETHEUS can evaluate a counterfactual against that scientific substrate and then rebuild the sheaf world model around the

Sridhar Mahadevan

Adobe Research · University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Causal World Models Causal Attribution Causal Reasoning in Language Models Causal Reasoning Causal Inference Large Language Model-Guided Scientific Discovery

May 9, 2026

CauSim: Scaling Causal Reasoning with Increasingly Complex Causal Simulators

Despite surpassing human performance across mathematics, coding, and other knowledge-intensive tasks, large language models (LLMs) continue to struggle with causal reasoning. A core obstacle is the target data itself: causal systems are complex and often expressed in non-executable forms, while ground-truth answers to causal queries are inherently scarce. We introduce CauSim, a framework that turns causal reasoning from a scarce-label problem into a scalable supervised one. CauSim constructs increasingly complex causal simulators: executable structural causal models (SCMs), incrementally built by LLMs, that scale to globally complex systems while maintaining verifiable answers to causal queries. CauSim operates across representations by formalizing non-executable causal knowledge into code, enabling data augmentation, and translating executable SCMs into natural language, enabling supervision in previously difficult-to-supervise representations. We structure our research into two parts: (1) how to construct increasingly complex causal simulators, and (2) a systematic study of what CauSim enables, demonstrating generalization across representations, consistent gains from curriculum scaling and data volume, LLM self-improvement through self-generated simulators, and data augmentation via formalization of existing domain knowledge.

Nicolás Astorga, Anita Kriz, Mihaela van der Schaar

DAMTP, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Structural Causal Models Knowledge Augmentation for Language Models Synthetic Data Generation Causal Reasoning in Language Models Causal Reasoning Synthetic Data Generation for Language Models

May 9, 2026

Reconciling Consistency-Based Diagnosis with Actual-Causality-Based Explanations

We establish, from the point of view of Explainable AI (XAI), connections between Consistency-Based Diagnosis (CBD), on one side, and Actual Causality and Causal Responsibility, on the other. CBD has received little attention from the XAI community. Connections between these two areas could have a fruitful impact on XAI and Explainable Data Management.

Leopoldo Bertossi

Carleton University, Canada · IMFD, Chile · Emeritus Professor. Adjunct Professor Western University, Canada.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence Actual Causality Causal Reasoning Causal Explanation

May 8, 2026

FactoryBench: Evaluating Industrial Machine Understanding

We introduce FactoryBench, a benchmark for evaluating time-series models and LLMs on machine understanding over industrial robotic telemetry. Q&A pairs are organized along four causal levels (state, intervention, counterfactual, decision) instantiating Pearl's ladder of causation, and span five answer formats: four structured formats are scored deterministically and free-form answers are scored by an LLM-as-judge voting protocol. We propose a scalable Q&A generation framework built around structured question templates, present FactoryWave (a dense, multitask, multivariate sensor dataset collected from a UR3 cobot and a KUKA KR10 industrial arm), and construct FactoryBench as a large-scale benchmark of over 70k Q&A items grounded in roughly 15k normalized episodes from FactoryWave, AURSAD, and voraus-AD. Zero-shot evaluation of six frontier LLMs shows that no model exceeds 50% on structured levels or 18% on decision-making, revealing a wide gap between current models and operational machine understanding.

Yanis Merzouki, Coral Izquierdo, Matei Ignuta-Ciuncanu +8

ETH Zurich · Forgis · UC3M +4

Manufacturing LLM Evaluation Robotics Causal Reasoning Industrial Robotics Industrial Automation

May 8, 2026

Causal EpiNets: Precision-corrected Bounds on Individual Treatment Effects using Epistemic Neural Networks

Individual treatment effects are not point-identified from data. The Probability of Necessity and Sufficiency (PNS) circumvents this limitation by characterizing individual-level causality through intersection bounds derived from combined experimental and observational data. In finite samples, however, standard plug-in estimators systematically fail: they violate structural probability constraints and suffer from extremum bias induced by max-min operators, yielding spuriously narrow intervals. We propose a neural framework for finite-sample PNS estimation that resolves both pathologies. We introduce an anchored neural architecture that guarantees structural constraint satisfaction by construction. To correct extremum bias, we employ precision-corrected intersection-bound inference, leveraging Epistemic Neural Networks for scalable, high-dimensional uncertainty quantification. Empirical evaluations confirm that this approach maintains nominal coverage and exact constraint validity in high-dimensional regimes where standard estimators systematically undercover.

Gandharv Patil, Keyi Tang, Raquel Aoki +1

McGill University/Mila · RBC Borealis

Causal Effect Estimation Causal Identifiability Causal Reasoning Individualized Treatment Effect Estimation

May 6, 2026

On Semantic Loss Fine-Tuning Approach for Preventing Model Collapse in Causal Reasoning

Standard fine-tuning of transformer models on causal reasoning tasks leads to catastrophic model collapse, where models learn trivial solutions such as always predicting "Yes" or "No" regardless of input structure. We demonstrate that fine-tuning Gemma 270M on transitivity and d-separation tasks without semantic loss results in 100% collapse rate, with models achieving misleadingly high accuracy (73.9%) while learning no causal reasoning. We propose a semantic loss function with graph-based logical constraints and dynamic lambda scheduling that prevents this collapse. Our approach achieves 70.4% accuracy on transitivity tasks and 68.6% on d-separation tasks with stable, context-dependent predictions, representing a 42.7% improvement over collapsed baselines. Adversarial evaluation on 1,000 structural reasoning samples shows semantic models achieve 67-70% accuracy while collapsed models fail catastrophically at 43-71%. We validate our findings through comprehensive benchmarking on 200,000+ evaluation samples across five model variants, demonstrating that semantic loss is essential and not optional, for stable causal reasoning in transformers.

Pratik Deshmukh, Atirek Gupta

Technical University of Vienna, Austria · HCLTech, Noida, India

LLM Fine-Tuning Model Collapse Causal Reasoning

May 5, 2026

NoisyCausal: A Benchmark for Evaluating Causal Reasoning Under Structured Noise

Causal reasoning in natural language requires identifying relevant variables, understanding their interactions, and reasoning about effects and interventions, often under noisy or ambiguous conditions. While large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong general reasoning abilities, they struggle to disentangle correlation from causation, particularly when observations are partially incorrect or irrelevant information is present. In this work, we introduce NoisyCausal, a new benchmark designed to evaluate causal reasoning under structured noise. Each instance is generated from a ground-truth causal graph and contextualized with a natural language scenario by injecting controllable forms of noise, such as irrelevant distractors, value perturbations, confounding, and partial observability. Moreover, we propose a modular reasoning framework that combines LLMs with explicit causal structure to address these challenges. Our method prompts the LLM to extract variables, construct a causal graph from context, and then reformulates the reasoning task as a structured prompt grounded in this graph. Rather than relying on statistical patterns alone, the LLM is guided by symbolic structure, enabling more interpretable and robust inference. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms standard prompting and reasoning baselines on NoisyCausal. Furthermore, it generalizes well to external benchmarks such as Cladder without task-specific tuning. Our findings highlight the importance of combining causal abstractions with language-driven reasoning to achieve faithful and robust causal understanding in LLMs.

Zhi Xu, Yun Fu

Northeastern University

Structural Causal Models Causal Reasoning in Language Models Causal Reasoning Language Model Robustness LLM Reasoning

May 5, 2026

SERE: Structural Example Retrieval for Enhancing LLMs in Event Causality Identification

Event Causality Identification (ECI) requires models to determine whether a given pair of events in a context exhibits a causal relationship. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across various NLP tasks, their effectiveness in ECI remains limited due to biases in causal reasoning, often leading to overprediction of causal relationships (causal hallucination). To mitigate these issues and enhance LLM performance in ECI, we propose SERE, a structural example retrieval framework that leverages LLMs' few-shot learning capabilities. SERE introduces an innovative retrieval mechanism based on three structural concepts: (i) Conceptual Path Metric, which measures the conceptual relationship between events using edit distance in ConceptNet; (ii) Syntactic Metric, which quantifies structural similarity through tree edit distance on syntactic trees; and (iii) Causal Pattern Filtering, which filters examples based on predefined causal structures using LLMs. By integrating these structural retrieval strategies, SERE selects more relevant examples to guide LLMs in causal reasoning, mitigating bias and improving accuracy in ECI tasks. Extensive experiments on multiple ECI datasets validate the effectiveness of SERE. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/DMIRLAB-Group/SERE.

Zhifeng Hao, Zhongjie Chen, Junhao Lu +5

School of Computer Science, Guangdong University of Technology · College of Mathematics and Computer, Shantou University · Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab +1

Causal Reasoning in Language Models Causal Reasoning LLM Reasoning

May 5, 2026

KARMA-MV: A Benchmark for Causal Question Answering on Music Videos

While significant progress has been made in Video Question Answering and cross-modal understanding, causal reasoning about how visual dynamics drive musical structure in music videos remains under-explored. We introduce KARMA-MV, a large-scale multiple-choice QA dataset derived from 2,682 YouTube music videos, designed to test models' ability to integrate temporal audio-visual cues and reason about visual-to-musical influence across reasoning, prediction, and counterfactual questions. Unlike traditional datasets requiring manual annotation, KARMA-MV leverages LLM reasoning for scalable generation and validation, yielding 37,737 MCQs. We propose a causal knowledge graph (CKG) approach that augments vision-language models (VLMs) with structured retrieval of cross-modal dependencies. Experiments on state-of-the-art VLMs and LLMs show consistent gains from CKG grounding -- especially for smaller models -- establishing the value of explicit causal structure for music-video reasoning. KARMA-MV provides a new benchmark for advancing causal audio-visual understanding beyond correlation.

Archishman Ghosh, Abhinaba Roy, Dorien Herremans

AMAAI Lab, Singapore University of Technology and Design

Audio-Visual Understanding Video QA Multimodal QA Audio-Visual QA Causal Reasoning Causal Reasoning in Videos

May 4, 2026

Shadow-Loom: Causal Reasoning over Graphical World Models of Narratives

Stories hold a reader's attention because they have causes, secrets, and consequences. Shadow-Loom is an experimental open-source framework that turns a narrative into a versioned graphical world model and lets two engines act on it: a causal physics grounded in Pearl's ladder of causation and a recently proposed counterfactual calculus over Ancestral Multi-World Networks; and a narrative physics that scores the same graph against four structural reader-states -- mystery, dramatic irony, suspense, and surprise -- in the tradition of Sternberg's curiosity/suspense/surprise triad, with suspense formalised in the structural-affect line of work on story comprehension and computational suspense. Large language models are used only at the boundary: extraction, rendering, and audit; identification, intervention, and counterfactual reasoning are carried out in typed code over the graph. The system is offered as a research artefact rather than as a benchmarked NLP model; code, fixtures, and pipeline are released open source.

David Wilmot

Causal World Models Interactive Storytelling World Models Causal Reasoning Counterfactual Reasoning

May 4, 2026

Causal Software Engineering: A Vision and Roadmap

Software engineering increasingly involves making high-stakes decisions under uncertainty, using signals from code, field data, and socio-technical processes. Recent AI-driven support (e.g., anomaly detection, predictive analytics, AIOps, as well as LLM-based agents) has amplified engineers' ability to detect patterns and synthesize content and recommendations, but many critical questions are interventional or counterfactual: What is the expected impact of changing a load-balancing strategy? Would an outage have been avoided under a different release plan? Correlational models answer "what tends to co-occur"; they struggle to answer "what would happen if we act." We propose Causal Software Engineering (CSE) as a future paradigm in which causal models and causal reasoning systematically inform activities across the software lifecycle, augmenting existing practices with explicit assumptions, uncertainty-aware effect estimates, and counterfactual diagnosis. We outline (i) a causal-first workflow view spanning development and operations, (ii) a staged roadmap for tools and organizational adoption, and (iii) an evaluation and benchmark agenda for measuring progress.

Roberto Pietrantuono, Luca Giamattei, Stefano Russo +2

University of Naples Federico II · Naples, Italy · Fraunhofer IESE +3

Software Engineering Causal Effect Estimation Causal Reasoning Causal Inference

May 1, 2026

To Use AI as Dice of Possibilities with Timing Computation

The dominant noun-based modeling paradigm, grounded in probability theory and committed to pre-specified noun entities as primitive modeling units, is insufficient as a grammar of thought: It leaves timing outside the computational scope, precluding any adequate representation of the future as an open space of possibilities. This paper addresses three conceptual gaps absent from the existing literature: (1) possibility space -- a framework admitting multiple possible timelines for the same event; (2) timing computation -- the treatment of timing as a computable rather than observed dimension; and (3) causal factum -- the maximal causal efficacy recovered by reasoning backward from possible futures, rather than assumed in advance. Together, these definitions dissolve the confounding problem inherent to noun-based causal inference and provide the foundation for a spontaneously growing causal-reasoning world model. As proof of concept, we instantiate the framework and apply it to longitudinal EHR data from 3,276 breast cancer patients, demonstrating for the first time, to our knowledge, automatic trajectory discovery and counterfactual timing deduction (i.e., a What-If Machine) in a purely data-driven manner.

Jia Li, Vipin Kumar, Rui Zhang

Department of Surgery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, United States · Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, United States

Causal World Models Time-Series Causal Discovery Causal Reasoning Counterfactual Reasoning

Apr 27, 2026

Grounding Before Generalizing: How AI Differs from Humans in Causal Transfer

Extracting abstract causal structures and applying them to novel situations is a hallmark of human intelligence. While Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown strong performance on a wide range of reasoning tasks, their capacity for interactive causal learning -- inducing latent structures through sequential exploration and transferring them across contexts -- remains uncharacterized. Human learners accomplish such transfer after minimal exposure, whereas classical Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents fail catastrophically. Whether state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI) models possess human-like mechanisms for abstract causal structure transfer is an open question. Using the OpenLock paradigm requiring sequential discovery of Common Cause (CC) and Common Effect (CE) structures, here we show that models exhibit fundamentally delayed or absent transfer: even successful models require initial environmental-specific mapping -- what we term environmental grounding -- before efficiency gains emerge, whereas humans leverage prior structural knowledge from the very first solution attempt. In the text-only condition, models matched or exceeded human discovery efficiency. In contrast, visual information -- in both the image-only and text-and-image conditions -- overall degraded rather than enhanced performance, revealing a broad reliance on symbolic processing rather than integrated multimodal reasoning. Models further exhibited systematic CC/CE asymmetries absent in humans, suggesting heuristic biases rather than direction-neutral causal abstraction. These findings reveal that large-scale statistical learning does not produce the decontextualized causal schemas underpinning human analogical reasoning, establishing grounding-dependent transfer as a fundamental limitation of current LLMs and VLMs.

Liangru Xiang, Yuxi Ma, Zhihao Cao +2

Department of Automation, Tsinghua University · State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence · Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Peking University +2

LLM Grounding Causal Structure Learning Causal Abstraction Causal Reasoning in Language Models VLM Reasoning Causal Reasoning