让大模型学会假设‘如果当初不同会怎样’,提升推理可靠性。
Causal Cartographer: From Mapping to Reasoning Over Counterfactual Worlds
- 用图检索增强生成提取真实世界因果关系
- 构建可支持反事实推理的因果知识库
- 适合需要可信因果推断的决策系统
因果世界模型能够回答关于环境的反事实问题,即预测若某些事件以不同方式发生,环境将如何演化。这要求理解事件链背后的因果机制,并对任意未见分布进行因果推断。目前,基础模型(尤其是大语言模型)尚未展现出超越记忆现有因果关系的因果推理能力。此外,真实世界中仅观测到事实世界,反事实评估受限于合成数据集。为此,我们提出Causal Cartographer框架:首先引入图检索增强生成代理,从数据中提取因果关系,构建大规模真实世界因果关系网络作为因果知识库;其次设计受因果约束的反事实推理代理,实现可靠的分步因果推断。实验表明,该方法能有效提取因果知识,提升大模型在因果推理任务中的鲁棒性,同时降低推理成本和虚假相关性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Causal world models are systems that can answer counterfactual questions about an environment of interest, i.e. predict how it would have evolved if an arbitrary subset of events had been realized differently. It requires understanding the underlying causes behind chains of events and conducting causal inference for arbitrary unseen distributions. So far, this task eludes foundation models, notably large language models (LLMs), which do not have demonstrated causal reasoning capabilities beyond the memorization of existing causal relationships. Furthermore, evaluating counterfactuals in real-world applications is challenging since only the factual world is observed, limiting evaluation to synthetic datasets. We address these problems by explicitly extracting and modeling causal relationships and propose the Causal Cartographer framework. First, we introduce a graph retrieval-augmented generation agent tasked to retrieve causal relationships from data. This approach allows us to construct a large network of real-world causal relationships that can serve as a repository of causal knowledge and build real-world counterfactuals. In addition, we create a counterfactual reasoning agent constrained by causal relationships to perform reliable step-by-step causal inference. We show that our approach can extract causal knowledge and improve the robustness of LLMs for causal reasoning tasks while reducing inference costs and spurious correlations.
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