CausalGraphBench: a Benchmark for Evaluating Language Models capabilities of Causal Graph discovery

Nikolay Babakov, Ehud Reiter, Alberto Bugarín-Diz


Abstract
This paper introduces CausalGraphBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to construct Causal Graphs (CGs), a critical component of reasoning models like Bayesian Networks. The benchmark comprises 35 CGs sourced from publicly available repositories and academic papers, each enriched with detailed metadata to facilitate systematic and consistent evaluation. We explore various LLM-driven methods for CG discovery, analyzing their performance across different graph sizes and complexity levels. Additionally, we examine the effects of data contamination on the quality of the generated CGs.Our findings reveal that methods relying on approaches with a limited number of queries to LLM, particularly those leveraging the full graph context, consistently outperform query-intensive and exhaustive approaches, which tend to overemphasize local relationships. Across all methods, performance declines as graph size increases.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-srw.16
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Jin Zhao, Mingyang Wang, Zhu Liu
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ACL | WS
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
240–258
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.acl-srw.16/
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Cite (ACL):
Nikolay Babakov, Ehud Reiter, and Alberto Bugarín-Diz. 2025. CausalGraphBench: a Benchmark for Evaluating Language Models capabilities of Causal Graph discovery. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop), pages 240–258, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CausalGraphBench: a Benchmark for Evaluating Language Models capabilities of Causal Graph discovery (Babakov et al., ACL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.acl-srw.16.pdf