核心概念
CausalBench is a comprehensive benchmark designed to thoroughly evaluate the causal learning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) across diverse datasets, tasks, and prompt formats.
要約
CausalBench is a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the causal learning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). It includes the following key components:
Data View:
- CausalBench incorporates 15 commonly used real-world causal learning datasets ranging from 2 to 109 nodes, enabling a comprehensive evaluation of LLM capabilities across various scales and complexities.
Task View:
- CausalBench establishes three core evaluation tasks - identifying correlation, causal skeleton, and causality - to assess LLM understanding of causal relationships at different depths and difficulties.
- An additional "chain of thought" task is included to further evaluate LLM reasoning abilities for causal discovery.
Prompt View:
- CausalBench utilizes four prompt formats - variable names, variable names with background knowledge, variable names with structured data, and variable names with both background knowledge and structured data - to fully exploit LLM capabilities in prior knowledge integration and long-text comprehension.
The evaluation results show that:
- Closed-source LLMs significantly outperform open-source models, but still fall short of classic and state-of-the-art causal learning methods.
- LLM performance declines as dataset scale and complexity increase, with better performance on identifying correlation and causal skeleton compared to causality.
- Background knowledge and structured data have varying impacts on LLM causal learning, depending on dataset characteristics and LLM capabilities.
- LLMs exhibit strengths in chain of thought reasoning for causal discovery tasks.
Overall, CausalBench provides a comprehensive framework to rigorously evaluate and understand the causal learning capabilities of LLMs, paving the way for further advancements in this critical area.