The Agentic Leash: Extracting Causal Feedback Fuzzy Cognitive Maps with LLMs

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for using large language models to autonomously extract and generate fuzzy cognitive maps from text, enabling dynamic, bidirectional causal reasoning with a degree of system autonomy.

Contribution

It introduces a novel LLM-based system that extracts and evolves fuzzy cognitive maps from text, demonstrating autonomous causal inference and system dynamics modeling.

Findings

Extracted FCMs match human-generated maps in equilibrium behavior.

Mixed FCMs can incorporate multiple sources and create new equilibria.

System-guided extraction produces consistent causal structures from complex text.

Abstract

We design a large-language-model (LLM) agent system that extracts causal feedback fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs) from raw text. The causal learning or extraction process is agentic both because of the LLM's semi-autonomy and because ultimately the FCM dynamical system's equilibria drive the LLM agents to fetch and process causal text. The fetched text can in principle modify the adaptive FCM causal structure and so modify the source of its quasi-autonomy$-$its equilibrium limit cycles and fixed-point attractors. This bidirectional process endows the evolving FCM dynamical system with a degree of autonomy while the system still stays on its agentic leash. We show in particular that a sequence of three system-instruction sets guide an LLM agent as it systematically extracts key nouns and noun phrases from text, as it extracts FCM concept nodes from among those nouns and noun phrases, and then as it extracts or infers partial or fuzzy causal edges between those FCM nodes. We test this FCM generation on a recent essay about the promise of AI from the late diplomat and political theorist Henry Kissinger and his colleagues. This three-step process produced FCM dynamical systems that converged to the same equilibrium limit cycles as did the human-generated FCMs even though the human-generated FCM differed in the number of nodes and edges. A final FCM mixed generated FCMs from separate Gemini and ChatGPT LLM agents. The mixed FCM absorbed the equilibria of its dominant mixture component but also created new equilibria of its own to better approximate the underlying causal dynamical system.