CausalLink: An Interactive Evaluation Framework for Causal Reasoning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We present CausalLink, an innovative evaluation framework that interactively assesses the causal reasoning skill to identify the correct intervention in conversational language models.Each CausalLink test case creates a hypothetical environment in which the language models are instructed to apply interventions to entities whose interactions follow predefined causal relations generated from controllable causal graphs.Our evaluation framework isolates causal capabilities from the confounding effects of world knowledge and semantic cues.We evaluate a series of LLMs in a scenario featuring movements of geometric shapes and discover that models start to exhibit reliable reasoning on two or three variables at the 14-billion-parameter scale.However, the performance of state-of-the-art models such as GPT4o degrades below random chance as the number of variables increases.We identify and analyze several key failure modes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.036 | 0.117 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".