Can Large Language Models Infer Causation from Correlation?

Causal inference is one of the hallmarks of human intelligence. While the field of CausalNLP has attracted much interest in the recent years, existing causal inference datasets in NLP primarily rely on discovering causality from empirical knowledge (e.g., commonsense knowledge). In this work, we propose the first benchmark dataset to test the pure causal inference skills of large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we formulate a novel task Corr2Cause, which takes a set of correlational statements and determines the causal relationship between the variables. We curate a large-scale dataset of more than 400K samples, on which we evaluate seventeen existing LLMs. Through our experiments, we identify a key shortcoming of LLMs in terms of their causal inference skills, and show that these models achieve almost close to random performance on the task. This shortcoming is somewhat mitigated when we try to re-purpose LLMs for this skill via finetuning, but we find that these models still fail to generalize – they can only perform causal inference in in-distribution settings when variable names and textual expressions used in the queries are similar to those in the training set, but fail in out-of-distribution settings generated by perturbing these queries. Corr2Cause is a challenging task for LLMs, and would be helpful in guiding future research on improving LLMs pure reasoning skills and generalizability. Our data is at this https URL. Our code is at this https URL.

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Recommended citation:

@article{jin2023can,
  title={Can Large Language Models Infer Causation from Correlation?},
  author={Jin, Zhijing and Liu, Jiarui and Lyu, Zhiheng and Poff, Spencer and Sachan, Mrinmaya and Mihalcea, Rada and Diab, Mona and Sch{\"o}lkopf, Bernhard},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.05836},
  year={2023}
}