Cause and Effect: Can Large Language Models Truly Understand Causality?

TL;DR

This paper introduces the CARE CA framework, a novel approach combining explicit and implicit causal reasoning modules with counterfactual analysis to improve LLMs' understanding and explainability of complex causal relationships.

Contribution

The paper presents a unified architecture that integrates causal detection, counterfactual explanations, and knowledge from ConceptNet, advancing causal reasoning capabilities in large language models.

Findings

Improved accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scores on benchmark datasets.

Enhanced interpretability of causal relationships in LLMs.

Introduction of CausalNet dataset for future research.

Abstract

With the rise of Large Language Models(LLMs), it has become crucial to understand their capabilities and limitations in deciphering and explaining the complex web of causal relationships that language entails. Current methods use either explicit or implicit causal reasoning, yet there is a strong need for a unified approach combining both to tackle a wide array of causal relationships more effectively. This research proposes a novel architecture called Context Aware Reasoning Enhancement with Counterfactual Analysis(CARE CA) framework to enhance causal reasoning and explainability. The proposed framework incorporates an explicit causal detection module with ConceptNet and counterfactual statements, as well as implicit causal detection through LLMs. Our framework goes one step further with a layer of counterfactual explanations to accentuate LLMs understanding of causality. The knowledge from ConceptNet enhances the performance of multiple causal reasoning tasks such as causal discovery, causal identification and counterfactual reasoning. The counterfactual sentences add explicit knowledge of the not caused by scenarios. By combining these powerful modules, our model aims to provide a deeper understanding of causal relationships, enabling enhanced interpretability. Evaluation of benchmark datasets shows improved performance across all metrics, such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scores. We also introduce CausalNet, a new dataset accompanied by our code, to facilitate further research in this domain.