Causal-Audit: Explicit and Auditable Graph-based Reasoning via Target-Aware Causal Chain Construction

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15281v1
• Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2026 23:24:18 GMT
• Title: Causal-Audit: Explicit and Auditable Graph-based Reasoning via Target-Aware Causal Chain Construction
• Abstract summary: Causal and intervention-based question answering is fundamental to advancing large language models.<n>We propose an explicit and auditable causal reasoning framework for context-free intervention-based question answering.
• Score: 14.96995835279229
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Causal and intervention-based question answering is fundamental to advancing large language models (LLMs) toward reasoning beyond surface-level correlations and understanding underlying causal mechanisms. However, existing LLM-based methods often rely on implicit language-level reasoning, resulting in opaque causal assumptions, unverifiable reasoning paths, and fragile predictions under complex interventions, particularly in context-free settings. In this paper, we propose an explicit and auditable causal reasoning framework for context-free intervention-based question answering. Our method formulates causal inference as structured reasoning over an explicit causal graph through four modular stages, rather than implicit end-to-end prediction. A key innovation is a target-aware causal graph construction strategy that treats the target variable as a core constraint during graph expansion, effectively suppressing irrelevant variables, spurious causal relations, and reasoning noise. We further introduce a path-level causal evidence aggregation mechanism that combines multiple causal paths while modeling both reinforcing and counteracting effects, enabling robust decision-making beyond single-chain reasoning. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms existing LLM-based methods while providing interpretable and auditable causal reasoning traces.

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