构建噪声环境下的因果推理测试集,提升大模型在混乱信息中判断因果的能力。
NoisyCausal: A Benchmark for Evaluating Causal Reasoning Under Structured Noise

- 通过可控噪声生成带干扰的因果推理题,模拟真实语言场景。
- 新方法使模型在噪声数据上准确率显著优于传统提示和基线。
- 适合研究大模型因果理解、可解释性与鲁棒推理的研究者。
自然语言中的因果推理需要识别相关变量、理解其交互关系,并在噪声或模糊条件下推断因果效应与干预结果。尽管大语言模型具备强大泛化能力,但在观察存在部分错误或混入无关信息时,难以区分相关性与因果性。本文提出 NoisyCausal,一个面向结构化噪声的因果推理评估基准。每个实例基于真实因果图生成,通过引入无关干扰、数值扰动、混淆因子及部分可观测等可控噪声,构建自然语言情景。我们还设计了一种模块化推理框架,将大模型与显式因果结构结合:先由模型提取变量并构建因果图,再基于该图重构推理任务为结构化提示。相比仅依赖统计模式的方法,该框架通过符号结构引导模型,实现更可解释、鲁棒的推理。实验表明,该方法在 NoisyCausal 上显著优于标准提示与基线方法,且在外部基准 Cladder 上无需微调即表现良好。结果表明,融合因果抽象与语言推理是实现大模型可信因果理解的关键。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Causal reasoning in natural language requires identifying relevant variables, understanding their interactions, and reasoning about effects and interventions, often under noisy or ambiguous conditions. While large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong general reasoning abilities, they struggle to disentangle correlation from causation, particularly when observations are partially incorrect or irrelevant information is present. In this work, we introduce NoisyCausal, a new benchmark designed to evaluate causal reasoning under structured noise. Each instance is generated from a ground-truth causal graph and contextualized with a natural language scenario by injecting controllable forms of noise, such as irrelevant distractors, value perturbations, confounding, and partial observability. Moreover, we propose a modular reasoning framework that combines LLMs with explicit causal structure to address these challenges. Our method prompts the LLM to extract variables, construct a causal graph from context, and then reformulates the reasoning task as a structured prompt grounded in this graph. Rather than relying on statistical patterns alone, the LLM is guided by symbolic structure, enabling more interpretable and robust inference. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms standard prompting and reasoning baselines on NoisyCausal. Furthermore, it generalizes well to external benchmarks such as Cladder without task-specific tuning. Our findings highlight the importance of combining causal abstractions with language-driven reasoning to achieve faithful and robust causal understanding in LLMs.
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