Linear-LLM-SCM: Benchmarking LLMs for Coefficient Elicitation in Linear-Gaussian Causal Models

arXiv:2602.10282v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown potential in identifying qualitative causal relations, but their ability to perform quantitative causal reasoning — estimating effect sizes that parametrize functional relationships — remains underexplored in continuous domains. We introduce Linear-LLM-SCM, a plug-and-play benchmarking framework for evaluating LLMs on linear Gaussian structural causal model (SCM) parametrization when the DAG is given. The framework decomposes a DAG into local parent-child sets and prompts an LLM to produce a regression-style structural equation per node, which is aggregated and compared against available ground-truth parameters. Our experiments show several challenges in such benchmarking tasks, namely, strong stochasticity in the results in some of the models and susceptibility to DAG misspecification via spurious edges in the continuous domains. Across models, we observe substantial variability in coefficient estimates for some settings and sensitivity to structural and semantic perturbations, highlighting current limitations of LLMs as quantitative causal parameterizers. We also open-sourced the benchmarking framework so that researchers can utilize their DAGs and any off-the-shelf LLMs plug-and-play for evaluation in their domains effortlessly.