Enhancing Causal Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Causal Attribution Model for Precision Fine-Tuning

This paper introduces a causal attribution model to enhance the interpretability of large language models (LLMs) and improve their causal reasoning abilities via precise fine-tuning. Despite LLMs' proficiency in diverse tasks, their reasoning processes often remain black box, and thus restrict targeted enhancement. We propose a novel causal attribution model that utilizes "do-operators" for constructing interventional scenarios, allowing us to quantify the contribution of different components in LLMs's causal reasoning process systematically. By assessing the proposed attribution scores through causal discovery tasks across various domains, we demonstrate that LLMs' effectiveness in causal discovery heavily relies on provided context and domain-specific knowledge but can also utilize numerical data with limited calculations in correlation, not causation. This motivates the proposed fine-tuned LLM for pairwise causal discovery, effectively and correctly leveraging both knowledge and numerical information.