{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/improving-causal-reasoning-in-large-language","title":"Improving Causal Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Survey","arxiv_id":"2410.16676","date":"2024-10-22","proceeding":null,"authors":["Longxuan Yu","Delin Chen","Siheng Xiong","Qingyang Wu","Qingzhen Liu","Dawei Li","Zhikai Chen","Xiaoze Liu","Liangming Pan"],"abstract":"Causal reasoning (CR) is a crucial aspect of intelligence, essential for problem-solving, decision-making, and understanding the world. While large language models (LLMs) can generate rationales for their outputs, their ability to reliably perform causal reasoning remains uncertain, often falling short in tasks requiring a deep understanding of causality. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of research aimed at enhancing LLMs for causal reasoning. We categorize existing methods based on the role of LLMs: either as reasoning engines or as helpers providing knowledge or data to traditional CR methods, followed by a detailed discussion of the methodologies in each category. We then evaluate the performance of LLMs on various causal reasoning tasks, providing key findings and in-depth analysis. Finally, we provide insights from current studies and highlight promising directions for future research. We aim for this work to serve as a comprehensive resource, fostering further advancements in causal reasoning with LLMs. Resources are available at https://github.com/chendl02/Awesome-LLM-causal-reasoning.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16676v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.16676v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"improving-causal-reasoning-in-large-language","repo_url":"https://github.com/chendl02/awesome-llm-causal-reasoning","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decision-making","task_name":"Decision Making"},{"task_slug":"survey","task_name":"Survey"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2410.16676","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2410.16676"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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