用拓扑理论让大模型更准地发现变量间因果关系
HOLOGRAPH: Active Causal Discovery via Sheaf-Theoretic Alignment of Large Language Model Priors
- 将大模型的因果推测建模为层叠结构,用数学拓扑判断全局一致性
- 在50-100变量数据上表现媲美主流方法,且能揭示隐藏耦合机制
- 适合研究因果推理、大模型可解释性与数学建模的学者
从观测数据中进行因果发现仍受可识别性限制。现有工作尝试利用大语言模型(LLM)作为先验因果知识来源,但依赖缺乏理论基础的启发式整合。本文提出HOLOGRAPH框架,通过层论(sheaf theory)形式化LLM引导的因果发现——将局部因果信念表示为变量子集上的预层截面。核心洞察是:一致的全局因果结构对应于全局截面的存在,而拓扑障碍表现为非零层上同调。我们提出代数潜变量投影处理隐藏混杂,并在信念流形上采用自然梯度下降实现严谨优化。在合成与真实世界基准测试中,HOLOGRAPH在50-100变量任务上取得竞争力性能,同时提供严格的数学基础。层论分析显示,恒等性、传递性和粘合公理数值精度低于10^{-6},但局部性公理在大图中失效,表明潜变量投影存在根本性非局部耦合。代码已开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Causal discovery from observational data remains fundamentally limited by identifiability constraints. Recent work has explored leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) as sources of prior causal knowledge, but existing approaches rely on heuristic integration that lacks theoretical grounding. We introduce HOLOGRAPH, a framework that formalizes LLM-guided causal discovery through sheaf theory--representing local causal beliefs as sections of a presheaf over variable subsets. Our key insight is that coherent global causal structure corresponds to the existence of a global section, while topological obstructions manifest as non-vanishing sheaf cohomology. We propose the Algebraic Latent Projection to handle hidden confounders and Natural Gradient Descent on the belief manifold for principled optimization. Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that HOLOGRAPH provides rigorous mathematical foundations while achieving competitive performance on causal discovery tasks with 50-100 variables. Our sheaf-theoretic analysis reveals that while Identity, Transitivity, and Gluing axioms are satisfied to numerical precision (<10^{-6}), the Locality axiom fails for larger graphs, suggesting fundamental non-local coupling in latent variable projections. Code is available at [https://github.com/hyunjun1121/holograph](https://github.com/hyunjun1121/holograph).
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