Towards Fine-grained Causal Reasoning and QA
On the map: LLM reasoning → Causal reasoning in LLMs
Abstract (arXiv)
Understanding causality is key to the success of NLP applications, especially in high-stakes domains. Causality comes in various perspectives such as enable and prevent that, despite their importance, have been largely ignored in the literature. This paper introduces a novel fine-grained causal reasoning dataset and presents a series of novel predictive tasks in NLP, such as causality detection, event causality extraction, and Causal QA. Our dataset contains human annotations of 25K cause-effect event pairs and 24K question-answering pairs within multi-sentence samples, where each can have multiple causal relationships. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we show that the complex relations in our dataset bring unique challenges to state-of-the-art methods across all three tasks and highlight potential research opportunities, especially in developing "causal-thinking" methods.
Key facts. Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Causal reasoning in LLMs, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 42 of its 66 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 15 Apr 2022.
Builds on
42 of 66 references.
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Citing papers per year: 2022: 2; 2023: 3; 2024: 4; 2025: 3; 2026: 1.
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- 2023Document Understanding Dataset and Evaluation (DUDE)cited by 132
- 2025Unveiling Causal Reasoning in Large Language Models: Reality or Mirage?cited by 36
- 2024Cofca: A Step-Wise Counterfactual Multi-hop QA benchmarkcited by 26
- 2022WikiWhy: Answering and Explaining Cause-and-Effect Questionscited by 21
- 2024A Critical Review of Causal Reasoning Benchmarks for Large Language Modelscited by 13
- 2025HellaSwag-Pro: A Large-Scale Bilingual Benchmark for Evaluating the Robustness of LLMs in Commonsense Reasoningcited by 7
- 2023Learning to Generalize for Cross-domain QAcited by 6
- 2025Human-MME: A Holistic Evaluation Benchmark for Human-Centric Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 5
- 2024A Comprehensive Evaluation on Event Reasoning of Large Language Modelscited by 4
- 2024EVIT: Event-Oriented Instruction Tuning for Event Reasoningcited by 2
- 2022Trust in Language Grounding: a new AI challenge for human-robot teamscited by 1
- 2026Enhancing Structural Mapping with LLM-derived Abstractions for Analogical Reasoning in Narrativescited by 1
1 more
- 2026Enhancing Structural Mapping with LLM-derived Abstractions for Analogical Reasoning in Narratives31 Mar 2026
- 2025Human-MME: A Holistic Evaluation Benchmark for Human-Centric Multimodal Large Language Models30 Sep 2025
- 2025Unveiling Causal Reasoning in Large Language Models: Reality or Mirage?26 Jun 2025
- 2025HellaSwag-Pro: A Large-Scale Bilingual Benchmark for Evaluating the Robustness of LLMs in Commonsense Reasoning17 Feb 2025
- 2024A Critical Review of Causal Reasoning Benchmarks for Large Language Models10 Jul 2024
- 2024A Comprehensive Evaluation on Event Reasoning of Large Language Models26 Apr 2024
- 2024EVIT: Event-Oriented Instruction Tuning for Event Reasoning18 Apr 2024
- 2024Cofca: A Step-Wise Counterfactual Multi-hop QA benchmark19 Feb 2024
- 2023Document Understanding Dataset and Evaluation (DUDE)15 May 2023
- 2023Learning to Generalize for Cross-domain QA14 May 2023
- 2023EDeR: A Dataset for Exploring Dependency Relations Between Events4 Apr 2023
- 2022WikiWhy: Answering and Explaining Cause-and-Effect Questions21 Oct 2022
1 more
- 2025Unveiling Causal Reasoning in Large Language Models: Reality or Mirage?cited by 36
- 2024Cofca: A Step-Wise Counterfactual Multi-hop QA benchmarkcited by 26
- 2024A Critical Review of Causal Reasoning Benchmarks for Large Language Modelscited by 13
- 2025HellaSwag-Pro: A Large-Scale Bilingual Benchmark for Evaluating the Robustness of LLMs in Commonsense Reasoningcited by 7
- 2024A Comprehensive Evaluation on Event Reasoning of Large Language Modelscited by 4
- 2024EVIT: Event-Oriented Instruction Tuning for Event Reasoningcited by 2
- 2026Enhancing Structural Mapping with LLM-derived Abstractions for Analogical Reasoning in Narrativescited by 1
- 2026Enhancing Structural Mapping with LLM-derived Abstractions for Analogical Reasoning in Narratives31 Mar 2026
- 2025Unveiling Causal Reasoning in Large Language Models: Reality or Mirage?26 Jun 2025
- 2025HellaSwag-Pro: A Large-Scale Bilingual Benchmark for Evaluating the Robustness of LLMs in Commonsense Reasoning17 Feb 2025
- 2024A Critical Review of Causal Reasoning Benchmarks for Large Language Models10 Jul 2024
- 2024A Comprehensive Evaluation on Event Reasoning of Large Language Models26 Apr 2024
- 2024EVIT: Event-Oriented Instruction Tuning for Event Reasoning18 Apr 2024
- 2024Cofca: A Step-Wise Counterfactual Multi-hop QA benchmark19 Feb 2024
- 2023Document Understanding Dataset and Evaluation (DUDE)cited by 132
- 2022WikiWhy: Answering and Explaining Cause-and-Effect Questionscited by 21
- 2023Learning to Generalize for Cross-domain QAcited by 6
- 2022Trust in Language Grounding: a new AI challenge for human-robot teamscited by 1
- 2023EDeR: A Dataset for Exploring Dependency Relations Between Eventscited by 0
- 2023Document Understanding Dataset and Evaluation (DUDE)15 May 2023
- 2023Learning to Generalize for Cross-domain QA14 May 2023
- 2023EDeR: A Dataset for Exploring Dependency Relations Between Events4 Apr 2023
- 2022WikiWhy: Answering and Explaining Cause-and-Effect Questions21 Oct 2022
- 2022Trust in Language Grounding: a new AI challenge for human-robot teams5 Sep 2022
Similar, not cited
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- 2025ACCESS : A Benchmark for Abstract Causal Event Discovery and Reasoning
- 2022e-CARE: a New Dataset for Exploring Explainable Causal Reasoning
- 2023CLadder: Assessing Causal Reasoning in Language Models
- 2025Causality for Natural Language Processing
- 2024Enhancing Event Causality Identification with Rationale and Structure-Aware Causal Question Answering
- 2025A Multi-Level Benchmark for Causal Language Understanding in Social Media Discourse
- 2026CausalFlip: A Benchmark for LLM Causal Judgment Beyond Semantic Matching
- 2024Causal Inference with Large Language Model: A Survey