Papers › A Causal World Model Underlying Next Token Prediction: Exploring GPT in a Controlled...
A Causal World Model Underlying Next Token Prediction: Exploring GPT in a Controlled Environment
Raanan Y. Rohekar, Yaniv Gurwicz, Sungduk Yu, Estelle Aflalo, Vasudev Lal
Do generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models, trained only to predict the next token, implicitly learn a world model from which a sequence is generated one token at a time? We address this question by deriving a causal interpretation of the attention mechanism in GPT, and suggesting a causal world model that arises from this interpretation. Furthermore, we propose that GPT models, at inference time, can be utilized for zero-shot causal structure learning for input sequences and present a confidence score. Empirical evaluation is conducted in a controlled environment using the setup and rules of the Othello and Chess strategy games. A GPT, pre-trained on real-world games played with the intention of winning, is tested on out-of-distribution synthetic data consisting of sequences of random legal moves. We find that the GPT model is likely to generate legal next moves for out-of-distribution sequences for which a causal structure is encoded in the attention mechanism with high confidence. In cases for which the GPT model generates illegal moves it also fails to capture any causal structure.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections