Causality for Large Language Models
Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence have driven a paradigm shift, where large language models (LLMs) with billions or trillions of parameters are trained on vast datasets, achieving unprecedented success across a series of language tasks. However, despite these successes, LLMs still rely on probabilistic modeling, which often captures spurious correlations rooted in linguistic patterns and social stereotypes, rather than the true causal relationships between entities and events. This limitation renders LLMs vulnerable to issues such as demographic biases, social stereotypes, and LLM hallucinations. These challenges highlight the urgent need to integrate causality into LLMs, moving beyond correlation-driven paradigms to build more reliable and ethically aligned AI systems. While many existing surveys and studies focus on utilizing prompt engineering to activate LLMs for causal knowledge or developing benchmarks to assess their causal reasoning abilities, most of these efforts rely on human intervention to activate pre-trained models. How to embed causality into the training process of LLMs and build more general and intelligent models remains unexplored. Recent research highlights that LLMs function as causal parrots, capable of reciting causal knowledge without truly understanding or applying it. These prompt-based methods are still limited to human interventional improvements. This survey aims to address this gap by exploring how causality can enhance LLMs at every stage of their lifecycle-from token embedding learning and foundation model training to fine-tuning, alignment, inference, and evaluation-paving the way for more interpretable, reliable, and causally-informed models. Additionally, we further outline six promising future directions to advance LLM development, enhance their causal reasoning capabilities, and address the current limitations these models face.
Code (1)
Tasks
Prompt EngineeringMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Probing Causality Manipulation of Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) have shown various ability on natural language processing, including problems about causality. It is not intuitive for LLMs to command causality, since pretrained models usually work on stati…
In-Context LearningRAGRetrievalRetrieval-augmented Generation+1Algorithmic causal structure emerging through compression
We explore the relationship between causality, symmetry, and compression. We build on and generalize the known connection between learning and compression to a setting where causal models are not identifiable. We propose…
Retrieval Augmented Generation based Large Language Models for Causality Mining
Causality detection and mining are important tasks in information retrieval due to their enormous use in information extraction, and knowledge graph construction. To solve these tasks, in existing literature there exist …
graph constructionInformation RetrievalPrompt EngineeringRAG+2CELLO: Causal Evaluation of Large Vision-Language Models
Causal reasoning is fundamental to human intelligence and crucial for effective decision-making in real-world environments. Despite recent advancements in large vision-language models (LVLMs), their ability to comprehend…
counterfactualDecision MakingEvent Causality Is Key to Computational Story Understanding
Cognitive science and symbolic AI research suggest that event causality provides vital information for story understanding. However, machine learning systems for story understanding rarely employ event causality, partial…
Event Causality IdentificationSentenceStory Generation