Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various domains. However, a fundamental question remains: Can LLMs effectively utilize causal knowledge for prediction and generation? Through empirical studies, we find that LLMs trained directly on large-scale data often capture spurious correlations rather than true causal relationships, leading to suboptimal performance, especially in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose Causal Attention Tuning (CAT), a novel approach that injects fine-grained causal knowledge into the attention mechanism. We propose an automated pipeline that leverages human priors to automatically generate token-level causal signals and introduce the Re-Attention mechanism to guide training, helping the model focus on causal structures while mitigating noise and biases in attention scores. Experimental results on our proposed Spurious Token Game (STG) benchmark and multiple downstream tasks demonstrate that our approach effectively leverages causal knowledge for prediction and remains robust in OOD scenarios. The CAT achieves an average improvement of 5.76% on the STG dataset and 1.56% on downstream tasks. Notably, the OOD performance of the Llama-3.1-8B model on STG_M increased from 64.5% to 90.5%, and Qwen’s OOD performance on the STG_H dataset improved from 25.4% to 55.9%. Implementation details can be found at https://github.com/Kairong-Han/CAT.

Aspect category detection (ACD) aims to automatically identify user-concerned aspects from online reviews, which is of great value for evaluating the fine-grained performance of a product. The most recent solutions tackle this problem via weakly supervised methods, achieving remarkable improvement over unsupervised methods. However, a closer look at these methods reveals that the required human efforts are nontrivial and can sometimes be hard to obtain. In this study, we explore the possibility of minimizing human guidance while improving detection performance, with a deep clustering method that relies merely on the category name of each aspect and a pretrained language model (LM). The LM, combined with prompt techniques, is employed as a knowledge base to automatically generate constraints for clustering, as well as to provide a representation space to perform the clustering. Our method (1) extracts extensive keywords to expand our understanding of each aspect, (2) automatically generates instance-level and concept-level constraints for clustering, and (3) trains the clustering model with the above constraints. We demonstrate the capability of the proposed framework through extensive experiments on nine benchmark datasets. Our model not only performs noticeably better than existing unsupervised approaches but also considerably surpasses weakly supervised methods that require more human efforts.