Corr2Cause Project

This repo contains the code and data for the ICLR 2024 paper:

​ Can Large Language Models Infer Causation from Correlation? (ICLR 2024)

​ Zhijing Jin, Jiarui Liu, Zhiheng Lyu, Spencer Poff, Mrinmaya Sachan, Rada Mihalcea, Mona Diab*, Bernhard Schölkopf* (*: Co-supervision)

File Structure

• code/:

  • Data-related codes: data_gen.cpp, data_verbalize.py, data_stats.py
  • Model-related codes: run_*.py

• data/: Our data folder. Feel free to download the data from https://huggingface.co/datasets/causalnlp/corr2cause to this folder.

How to Run

Step 1. Corr2Cause Data Generation

Shortcut: You can directly download the data from https://huggingface.co/datasets/causalnlp/corr2cause

To generate the data yourself:

To reproduce our result, run the following command:

• g++ data_gen.cpp -o data_gen
• ./data_gen

To change the graph size n, manually change the constant in the line 11 of the code; to change the output path, change the line 515 in the code. Note that for some larger n, you should enhance the length of array uniqueDag, but a high length on some OS will result in compiler error due to the default memory space.

What each file does:

• Graph generation, remove duplication and store: reconstruct_graph namespace in data_gen.cpp
• D-seperation check: d_seperate namespace in data_gen.cpp
• Node relationship generation: node_relations namespace in data_gen.cpp
• Compose the synthetic dataset: TBA

Step 2. Evaluating Existing Models

Shortcut: To replicate the results, since we save all the output files of our models into the output folder (232M). Feel free to download them from here, and use the data_v2/outputs/ folder by mv corr2cause_supplementary/data_v2/outputs/ ./data/. Then you can run:

python code/run_model.py -model_types random gpt huggingface coauthor_files

To generate the predictions yourself:

To generate predictions with Alpaca and Llama models specify the location of the input file, output file and the weights in code/run_llama.py and/or code/run_alpaca.py and run

python code/run_llama.py

To generate predictions for other models, run

python code/run_model.py -inference_mode -model_types random gpt huggingface coauthor_files

Step 3. Finetuning Models

To finetune BERT-based models, check the code in code/finetune/. Feel free to customize the code for you to use.

The script below provides an example of finetuning the roberta-large-mnli model:

python3 train.py \
    --dataset_df_dir <dataset_df_dir> \
    --splits_filename train.csv val.csv test.csv \
    --text_col input \
    --y_col label \
    --class_weight automatic \
    --seed 42 \
    --model_save_dir <model_save_dir> \
    --log_dir <log_dir> \
    --iter_time_span 1000 \
    --output_type categorical \
    --num_classes 3 \
    --pretrained_model roberta-large-mnli \
    --lr 1e-5 \
    --max_length 512 \
    --csv_output_path <csv_output_path> \
    --n_epochs 10

To evaluate the model, please refer to the script below:

python3 eval.py \
    --dataset_df_dir <dataset_df_dir> \
    --splits_filename test.csv test.csv test.csv \
    --text_col input \
    --y_col label \
    --seed 42 \
    --model_load_path <model_load_path> \
    --log_dir <log_dir> \
    --pretrained_model roberta-large-mnli \
    --csv_output_path <csv_output_path> \
    --output_type categorical \
    --num_classes 3 \
    --img_output_dir <img_output_dir>

Other Data

If you need extra info, we open-source all different formats of the data and outputs here. Feel free to use the data_v2 folder by mv corr2cause_supplementary/data_v2/ ./data/. Inside this folder, you can see the following subfolders:

• outputs (232M): all the output files of our models
• data_2class (727M): Our main data. The "entailment" class is the "valid" class (v=1) as mentioned in the paper.
• data_2class_from_Z (718M): The variable refactor version which we swap A, B, C, ... to Z, Y, W, ...
• data_3class (24M): just as supplementary, we also created the 3-class version of our data, containing "entailment", "neutral" (the hypothesized causal relation can be true sometimes, but there is no sufficient information), and "contradiction" (the hypothesized causal relation does not hold on any causal graphs in the Markov Equivalence class)
• data_3class_from_Z (798M)
• data_paraph (4.4M): The paraphrased of our test set (for our robustness test)

Contact

• For any questions about the data generation process, contact Zhiheng Lyu
• For any questions about finetuning models, contact Jiarui Liu
• For any other questions, contact Zhijing Jin