Language Models as Causal Effect Generators (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Using sequence-driven structural causal models (SD-SCMs) we characterize how SD-SCAMs enables sampling from observational, interventional, and counterfactual distributions according to the desired causal structure.
Approach: They propose a sequence-driven structural causal model that uses language models to parameterize a structural causal system based on a user-specified DAG.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods and can underpin auditing of language models for (un)desirable causal effects, such as misinformation or discrimination.

Similar Papers

Causal Inference with Large Language Model: A Survey (2025.findings-naacl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing causal inference frameworks do not match human judgment in several key areas, such as domain knowledge, logical inference, and cultural context.
Approach: They propose to apply large language models to causal inference tasks . they summarize the main causal problems and approaches and compare their results .
Outcome: The proposed methods are compared with traditional methods in healthcare, finance, and economics.
CodeSCM: Causal Analysis for Multi-Modal Code Generation (2025.naacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Prior work has shown that multimodal prompts can be highly sensitive, where small adjustments might result in drastically different responses from the model.
Approach: They propose a Structural Causal Model (SCM) for analyzing multi-modal code generation using large language models (LLMs).
Outcome: The proposed model is based on the principles of Causal Mediation Analysis and quantifies the causal effects of different prompt modalities on the model.
Large Language Models and Causal Inference in Collaboration: A Comprehensive Survey (2025.findings-naacl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential to enhance Natural Language Processing (NLP) models in areas such as predictive accuracy, fairness, robustness, and explainability.
Approach: They evaluate or improve generative Large Language Models from a causal perspective in areas such as reasoning capacity, fairness and safety issues, explainability, and handling multimodality.
Outcome: The proposed models can be used to perform causal relationship discovery and causal effect estimation tasks.
CausalEval: Towards Better Causal Reasoning in Language Models (2025.naacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have been used for a variety of tasks, including problem-solving, decision-making, and understanding of the world.
Approach: They propose a review of existing methods aimed at enhancing LMs for causal reasoning . they categorize existing methods as reasoning engines or as helpers providing knowledge or data to traditional methods .
Outcome: The proposed methods perform better than existing methods on a range of tasks.
Challenges of Using Text Classifiers for Causal Inference (D18-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: a number of scientific analyses focus on low-dimensional structured data, but text classifiers can be used to produce structured variables.
Approach: They propose to use text classifiers to conduct causal analyses on simulated and Yelp data.
Outcome: The proposed method can be used on simulated and Yelp data.
Causal-LLM: A Unified One-Shot Framework for Prompt- and Data-Driven Causal Graph Discovery (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Current causal discovery methods rely on pairwise or iterative strategies that fail to capture global dependencies, amplify local biases, and reduce overall accuracy.
Approach: They propose a framework for one-step full causal graph discovery using prompt-based discovery and a data-driven method for settings without metadata.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models by approximately 40% in edge accuracy on datasets like Asia and Sachs while maintaining strong performance on more complex graphs.
Can Large Language Models Infer Causal Relationships from Real-World Text? (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing work evaluating large language models relies on synthetic or simplified texts with explicit causal relationships.
Approach: They develop a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' ability to infer causal relationships from texts . they use a dataset of texts with different levels of explicitness and complexity .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark is the first-ever real-world dataset for this task.
Pipeline for modeling causal beliefs from natural language (2023.acl-demo)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods to analyze language data for psychological causality are difficult to advance as they do not isolate cognitive mechanisms.
Approach: They propose a pipeline that leverages a Large Language Model to identify causal claims made in natural language documents and applies a clustering algorithm to group causal claims based on their semantic topics.
Outcome: The proposed pipeline analyzes the Covid-19 vaccine in tweets and generates a causal claim network.
Causal Inference in Natural Language Processing: Estimation, Prediction, Interpretation and Beyond (2022.tacl-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: causality has not had the same importance in natural language processing, says aaron e. smith . he says research on causality in NLP remains scattered across domains without unified definitions .
Approach: They propose to consolidate research on causality in NLP across academic areas . they explore potential uses of causal inference to improve robustness, fairness, interpretability .
Outcome: The proposed method is a unified overview of causal inference for the NLP community.
DoubleLingo: Causal Estimation with Large Language Models (2024.naacl-short)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for causal estimation are inadequate for noisy text data.
Approach: They propose to use LLM-based nuisance models to estimate causal effects from non-randomized data using assumptions about the underlying data distribution.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces the relative absolute error by 10.4% over existing methods on the best available dataset.

What is GenGO?

GenGO is an NLP powered publication search system. It currenctly indexes 30k+ papers from ACL Anthology, and implements multi-aspect summarization, semantic search, and more!

Information

About
Limitations