{"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/is-knowledge-all-large-language-models-needed","title":"Is Knowledge All Large Language Models Needed for Causal Reasoning?","arxiv_id":"2401.00139","date":"2023-12-30","proceeding":null,"authors":["Hengrui Cai","ShengJie Liu","Rui Song"],"abstract":"This paper explores the causal reasoning of large language models (LLMs) to enhance their interpretability and reliability in advancing artificial intelligence. Despite the proficiency of LLMs in a range of tasks, their potential for understanding causality requires further exploration. We propose a novel causal attribution model that utilizes ``do-operators\" for constructing counterfactual scenarios, allowing us to systematically quantify the influence of input numerical data and LLMs' pre-existing knowledge on their causal reasoning processes. Our newly developed experimental setup assesses LLMs' reliance on contextual information and inherent knowledge across various domains. Our evaluation reveals that LLMs' causal reasoning ability mainly depends on the context and domain-specific knowledge provided. In the absence of such knowledge, LLMs can still maintain a degree of causal reasoning using the available numerical data, albeit with limitations in the calculations. This motivates the proposed fine-tuned LLM for pairwise causal discovery, effectively leveraging both knowledge and numerical information.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.00139v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.00139v2.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":"is-knowledge-all-large-language-models-needed","repo_url":"https://github.com/ncsulsj/causal_llm","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"all","task_name":"All"},{"task_slug":"causal-discovery","task_name":"Causal Discovery"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"counterfactual"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2401.00139","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2401.00139"}},"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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