Heads or Tails: A Simple Example of Causal Abstractive Simulation
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866911132088795136 |
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| author | Simmons, Gabriel |
| author_facet | Simmons, Gabriel |
| contents | This note illustrates how a variety of causal abstraction arXiv:1707.00819 arXiv:1812.03789, defined here as causal abstractive simulation, can be used to formalize a simple example of language model simulation. This note considers the case of simulating a fair coin toss with a language model. Examples are presented illustrating the ways language models can fail to simulate, and a success case is presented, illustrating how this formalism may be used to prove that a language model simulates some other system, given a causal description of the system. This note may be of interest to three groups. For practitioners in the growing field of language model simulation, causal abstractive simulation is a means to connect ad-hoc statistical benchmarking practices to the solid formal foundation of causality. Philosophers of AI and philosophers of mind may be interested as causal abstractive simulation gives a precise operationalization to the idea that language models are role-playing arXiv:2402.12422. Mathematicians and others working on causal abstraction may be interested to see a new application of the core ideas that yields a new variation of causal abstraction. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_01136 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Heads or Tails: A Simple Example of Causal Abstractive Simulation Simmons, Gabriel Artificial Intelligence This note illustrates how a variety of causal abstraction arXiv:1707.00819 arXiv:1812.03789, defined here as causal abstractive simulation, can be used to formalize a simple example of language model simulation. This note considers the case of simulating a fair coin toss with a language model. Examples are presented illustrating the ways language models can fail to simulate, and a success case is presented, illustrating how this formalism may be used to prove that a language model simulates some other system, given a causal description of the system. This note may be of interest to three groups. For practitioners in the growing field of language model simulation, causal abstractive simulation is a means to connect ad-hoc statistical benchmarking practices to the solid formal foundation of causality. Philosophers of AI and philosophers of mind may be interested as causal abstractive simulation gives a precise operationalization to the idea that language models are role-playing arXiv:2402.12422. Mathematicians and others working on causal abstraction may be interested to see a new application of the core ideas that yields a new variation of causal abstraction. |
| title | Heads or Tails: A Simple Example of Causal Abstractive Simulation |
| topic | Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01136 |