CLadder: Assessing Causal Reasoning in Language Models

🚀 Get the dataset now! cladder-v1.zip

• zip file size: 6.5MB
• Version: v1
• Date: 2023-05-25
• Huggingface dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/causalnlp/CLadder

This repo contains the full CLadder dataset (and code) for evaluating (formal) causal reasoning in language models. The dataset asks yes/no questions in natural language that generally require statistical and causal inference to answer.

Although there are several different variants, the main dataset (including questions from all variants) is cladder-v1-balanced.json, so that is the recommended file to use for most purposes.

Our NeurIPS 2023 paper:

"CLadder: Assessing Causal Reasoning in Language Models" by Zhijing Jin*, Yuen Chen*, Felix Leeb*, Luigi Gresele*, Ojasv Kamal, Zhiheng Lyu, Kevin Blin, Fernando Gonzalez, Max Kleiman-Weiner, Mrinmaya Sachan, Bernhard Schölkopf.

Citation:

@inproceedings{jin2023cladder,
    author = {Zhijing Jin and Yuen Chen and Felix Leeb and Luigi Gresele and Ojasv Kamal and Zhiheng Lyu and Kevin Blin and Fernando Gonzalez and Max Kleiman-Weiner and Mrinmaya Sachan and Bernhard Sch{\"{o}}lkopf},
    title = "{CL}adder: {A}ssessing Causal Reasoning in Language Models",
    year = "2023",
    booktitle = "NeurIPS",
    url = "https://openreview.net/forum?id=e2wtjx0Yqu",
}

Dataset

Data Usage

You can download our data either from huggingface (https://huggingface.co/datasets/causalnlp/CLadder), or cladder-v1.zip in our repo.

In our data, each sample represents a single question. Each question has the following fields:

• question_id: a unique (for the file) identifier for the question
• desc_id: a more descriptive identifier for the question (generally not needed)
• given_info: natural language supplementary information that should be given to the model to answer the question.
• question: the question itself, in natural language
• answer: the answer to the question {yes, no}
• reasoning: a step-by-step explanation of the causal reasoning used to answer the question
• meta: metadata about the question, including the following fields:
  • query_type: the type of question, one of {ATE, marginal, correlation, ETT, NDE, NIE, etc.}
  • rung: the rung of the ladder of causation that the question corresponds to
  • story_id: the id of the story used to verbalize the question
  • graph_id: the id of the causal graph structure used to verbalize the question
  • model_id: the id of the underlying model used to generate the question (corresponding to a model in cladder-v1-meta-models.json)
  • groundtruth: the groundtruth value of what the question is asking about

Prompting the Model

When evaluating a language model, it is recommended that the prompt includes 3 components:

1. The background field of the model corresponding to the question (found in cladder-v1-meta-models.json using the model_id field of the question's metadata).
2. The given_info field of the question.
3. The question field of the question.

Example

For example, the prompt corresponding to question 16825 (which asks about the average treatment effect for a simple instrumental variable setting) in cladder-v1-balanced.json could be:

Imagine a self-contained, hypothetical world with only the following conditions, and without any unmentioned factors or causal relationships: Unobserved confounders has a direct effect on education level and salary. Proximity to a college has a direct effect on education level. Education level has a direct effect on salary. Unobserved confounders is unobserved.

For people living far from a college, the probability of high salary is 35%. For people living close to a college, the probability of high salary is 53%. For people living far from a college, the probability of college degree or higher is 40%. For people living close to a college, the probability of college degree or higher is 73%.

Will college degree or higher decrease the chance of high salary?

Here the correct answer is no. The associated reasoning steps found in the reasoning field are:

Step 0: Let V2 = proximity to a college; V1 = unobserved confounders; X = education level; Y = salary.

Step 1: V1->X,V2->X,V1->Y,X->Y

Step 2: E[Y | do(X = 1)] - E[Y | do(X = 0)]

Step 3: [P(Y=1|V2=1)-P(Y=1|V2=0)]/[P(X=1|V2=1)-P(X=1|V2=0)]

Step 4: P(Y=1 | V2=0) = 0.35; P(Y=1 | V2=1) = 0.53; P(X=1 | V2=0) = 0.40; P(X=1 | V2=1) = 0.73

Step 5: (0.53 - 0.35) / (0.73 - 0.40) = 0.55

Solution: 0.55 > 0

Note that in addition to the background field, the model information found in cladder-v1-meta-models.json contains sufficient information to fully reconstruct the underlying causal model used to generate this question (and 59 others).

Dataset Statistics

Here are some basic statistics for the main dataset (cladder-v1-balanced.json).

Number of questions: 10,112 Answers: {"yes": 5,056, "no": 5,056}

Query Types:

Query Type	Rung	Code	Number	Percent
Correlation	1	correlation	1422	14.1%
Marginal Distribution	1	marginal	1580	15.6%
Expaining Away Effect	1	exp_away	158	1.6%
Average Treatment Effect	2	ate	1422	14.1%
Backdoor Adjustment Set	2	backadj	1580	15.6%
Collider Bias	2	collider_bias	158	1.6%
Effect of the Treatment on the Treated	3	ett	1264	12.5%
Natural Direct Effect	3	nde	316	3.1%
Natural Indirect Effect	3	nie	790	7.8%
Counterfactual (deterministic)	3	det-counterfactual	1422	14.1%

Graph Types:

Graph Type	Number	Percent
IV	790	7.8%
arrowhead	1264	12.5%
chain	1106	10.9%
collision	632	6.2%
confounding	948	9.4%
diamond	1106	10.9%
diamondcut	948	9.4%
fork	948	9.4%
frontdoor	1106	10.9%
mediation	1264	12.5%

Data Variants

If you want to dig a little deeper into understanding how well language models perform causal reasoning, we also include a few variants of the dataset (each of which contains about 10k questions, and the balanced dataset is made up of an even mix of these variants):

• cladder-v1-aggregate.json: a combination of all the variants below but where each story has approximately the same number of questions (100-200).
• cladder-v1-q-easy.json: questions that are easy to answer (i.e. the causal mechanisms generally conform to what you would expect)
• cladder-v1-q-hard.json: the structure of the causal graph remains unchanged, but the strengths of causal mechanisms are generally counterintuitive
• cladder-v1-q-commonsense.json: an even mix of easy and hard questions
• cladder-v1-q-anticommonsense.json: for each causal graph we replace one of the variables (either treatment or outcome) with a randomly selected one that common sense would tell you is not related to the other variable at all.
• cladder-v1-q-nonsense.json: here the graph structure remains unchanged, but all variables are replaced from semantically meaningful concepts to randomly generated 4-letter words.

Code Setup

To use the codes in this repo, first clone this repo:

git clone https://github.com/causalNLP/causalbenchmark
cd causalbenchmark

Then, install the dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Finally, install the package:

pip install -e .

Check to make sure everything is setup correctly by running the unit tests:

pytest

Code Usage: Data Generation

Generate demo data using

fig generate demo

Checkout the corresponding config file here.

And the script which is implemented in generator.py - the function generate_and_store.

Also, you can run the unit tests with

pytest

Code Usage: Data Generation

Check the eval/ folder for all the run_*.py code files in to see how to run different LLMs in inference mode on our data.

Output Files

We saved a copy of all model output files, which you can access here.

Thanks again for your interest in our work! Feel free to post a github issue if you have any questions.