mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

HOLOGRAPH: Active Causal Discovery via Sheaf-Theoretic Alignment of Large Language Model Priors

arXiv 2512.24478 ↗First posted 30 Dec 2025cs.LG cs.AI stat.MEcited by 0

On the map: LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation → Process reward models for reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

Causal discovery from observational data remains fundamentally limited by identifiability constraints. Recent work has explored leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) as sources of prior causal knowledge, but existing approaches rely on heuristic integration that lacks theoretical grounding. We introduce HOLOGRAPH, a framework that formalizes LLM-guided causal discovery through sheaf theory--representing local causal beliefs as sections of a presheaf over variable subsets. Our key insight is that coherent global causal structure corresponds to the existence of a global section, while topological obstructions manifest as non-vanishing sheaf cohomology. We propose the Algebraic Latent Projection to handle hidden confounders and Natural Gradient Descent on the belief manifold for principled optimization. Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that HOLOGRAPH provides rigorous mathematical foundations while achieving competitive performance on causal discovery tasks with 50-100 variables. Our sheaf-theoretic analysis reveals that while Identity, Transitivity, and Gluing axioms are satisfied to numerical precision (<10^{-6}), the Locality axiom fails for larger graphs, suggesting fundamental non-local coupling in latent variable projections. Code is available at [https://github.com/hyunjun1121/holograph](https://github.com/hyunjun1121/holograph).

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Process reward models for reasoning, one of 10 directions in LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation. Builds on 9 of its 27 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 30 Dec 2025.

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9 of 27 references.

References · 9

  1. 2018DAGs with NO TEARS: Continuous Optimization for Structure Learningcited by 745
  2. 2023Causal Reasoning and Large Language Models: Opening a New Frontier for Causalitycited by 348
  3. 2022Neural Sheaf Diffusion: A Topological Perspective on Heterophily and Oversmoothing in GNNscited by 208
  4. 2020On the Role of Sparsity and DAG Constraints for Learning Linear DAGscited by 186
  5. 2022DAGMA: Learning DAGs via M-matrices and a Log-Determinant Acyclicity Characterizationcited by 135
  6. 2020Sheaf Neural Networkscited by 80
  7. 2015Learning Causal Graphs with Small Interventionscited by 63
  8. 2024Causality for Large Language Modelscited by 24
  9. 2025Large Causal Models from Large Language Modelscited by 8

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  1. 2024Large Language Models for Constrained-Based Causal Discovery
  2. 2024LLM-initialized Differentiable Causal Discovery
  3. 2025Causal Reasoning in Pieces: Modular In-Context Learning for Causal Discovery
  4. 2024Causal Graph Discovery with Retrieval-Augmented Generation based Large Language Models
  5. 2023Integrating Large Language Model for Improved Causal Discovery
  6. 2024CausalGraph2LLM: Evaluating LLMs for Causal Queries
  7. 2026Leveraging Large Language Models for Causal Discovery: a Constraint-based, Argumentation-driven Approach
  8. 2024ALCM: Autonomous LLM-Augmented Causal Discovery Framework