Genuine human-like causal reasoning is fundamental for strong artificial intelligence. Humans typically identify whether an event is part of the causal chain first, and then influenced by modulatory factors such as morality, normality, and intention to make the final judgment. These two stages naturally map to the fields of 1) actual causality that provides formalisms for causal chain membership and 2) causal judgment from cognitive science that studies psychological modulators that influence causal selection. However, these two domains have largely been studied in isolation, leaving a gap for a systematic method based on LLMs. Therefore, we introduce HCR-Reasoner, a framework that systematically integrates the theory of actual causality and causal judgment into LLMs for human-like causal reasoning. It simulates humans by using actual causality formalisms to filter for structurally necessary candidate causes and causal judgment factors to determine the psychologically selected cause. For fine-grained evaluation, we introduce HCR-Bench, a challenging benchmark with 1,093 annotated instances with detailed reasoning steps. Results show HCR-Reasoner consistently and significantly improves LLMs' causal alignment with humans, and that explicitly integrating theory-guided reasoning into LLMs is highly effective for achieving faithful human-like causal reasoning.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into our everyday lives, understanding their ability to comprehend human mental states becomes critical for ensuring effective interactions. However, despite the recent attempts to assess the Theory-of-Mind (ToM) reasoning capabilities of LLMs, the degree to which these models can align with human ToM remains a nuanced topic of exploration. This is primarily due to two distinct challenges: (1) the presence of inconsistent results from previous evaluations, and (2) concerns surrounding the validity of existing evaluation methodologies. To address these challenges, we present a novel framework for procedurally generating evaluations with LLMs by populating causal templates. Using our framework, we create a new social reasoning benchmark (BigToM) for LLMs which consists of 25 controls and 5,000 model-written evaluations. We find that human participants rate the quality of our benchmark higher than previous crowd-sourced evaluations and comparable to expert-written evaluations. Using BigToM, we evaluate the social reasoning capabilities of a variety of LLMs and compare model performances with human performance. Our results suggest that GPT4 has ToM capabilities that mirror human inference patterns, though less reliable, while other LLMs struggle.

The causal capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is a matter of significant debate, with critical implications for the use of LLMs in societally impactful domains such as medicine, science, law, and policy. We further our understanding of LLMs and their causal implications, considering the distinctions between different types of causal reasoning tasks, as well as the entangled threats of construct and measurement validity. LLM-based methods establish new state-of-the-art accuracies on multiple causal benchmarks. Algorithms based on GPT-3.5 and 4 outperform existing algorithms on a pairwise causal discovery task (97%, 13 points gain), counterfactual reasoning task (92%, 20 points gain), and actual causality (86% accuracy in determining necessary and sufficient causes in vignettes). At the same time, LLMs exhibit unpredictable failure modes and we provide some techniques to interpret their robustness. Crucially, LLMs perform these causal tasks while relying on sources of knowledge and methods distinct from and complementary to non-LLM based approaches. Specifically, LLMs bring capabilities so far understood to be restricted to humans, such as using collected knowledge to generate causal graphs or identifying background causal context from natural language. We envision LLMs to be used alongside existing causal methods, as a proxy for human domain knowledge and to reduce human effort in setting up a causal analysis, one of the biggest impediments to the widespread adoption of causal methods. We also see existing causal methods as promising tools for LLMs to formalize, validate, and communicate their reasoning especially in high-stakes scenarios. In capturing common sense and domain knowledge about causal mechanisms and supporting translation between natural language and formal methods, LLMs open new frontiers for advancing the research, practice, and adoption of causality.

Learning transferable knowledge across similar but different settings is a fundamental component of generalized intelligence. In this paper, we approach the transfer learning challenge from a causal theory perspective. Our agent is endowed with two basic yet general theories for transfer learning: (i) a task shares a common abstract structure that is invariant across domains, and (ii) the behavior of specific features of the environment remain constant across domains. We adopt a Bayesian perspective of causal theory induction and use these theories to transfer knowledge between environments. Given these general theories, the goal is to train an agent by interactively exploring the problem space to (i) discover, form, and transfer useful abstract and structural knowledge, and (ii) induce useful knowledge from the instance-level attributes observed in the environment. A hierarchy of Bayesian structures is used to model abstract-level structural causal knowledge, and an instance-level associative learning scheme learns which specific objects can be used to induce state changes through interaction. This model-learning scheme is then integrated with a model-based planner to achieve a task in the OpenLock environment, a virtual ``escape room'' with a complex hierarchy that requires agents to reason about an abstract, generalized causal structure. We compare performances against a set of predominate model-free reinforcement learning(RL) algorithms. RL agents showed poor ability transferring learned knowledge across different trials. Whereas the proposed model revealed similar performance trends as human learners, and more importantly, demonstrated transfer behavior across trials and learning situations.

Anomaly detection in database management systems (DBMSs) is difficult because of increasing number of statistics (stat) and event metrics in big data system. In this paper, I propose an automatic DBMS diagnosis system that detects anomaly periods with abnormal DB stat metrics and finds causal events in the periods. Reconstruction error from deep autoencoder and statistical process control approach are applied to detect time period with anomalies. Related events are found using time series similarity measures between events and abnormal stat metrics. After training deep autoencoder with DBMS metric data, efficacy of anomaly detection is investigated from other DBMSs containing anomalies. Experiment results show effectiveness of proposed model, especially, batch temporal normalization layer. Proposed model is used for publishing automatic DBMS diagnosis reports in order to determine DBMS configuration and SQL tuning.