Saved in:
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17784 |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| _version_ | 1866909877589245952 |
|---|---|
| author | Li, Jin Wang, Shoujin Zhang, Qi Liu, Feng Liu, Tongliang Cao, Longbing Yu, Shui Chen, Fang |
| author_facet | Li, Jin Wang, Shoujin Zhang, Qi Liu, Feng Liu, Tongliang Cao, Longbing Yu, Shui Chen, Fang |
| contents | Uncovering cause-and-effect mechanisms from data is fundamental to scientific progress. While large language models (LLMs) show promise for enhancing causal discovery (CD) from unstructured data, their application to the increasingly prevalent multimodal setting remains a critical challenge. Even with the advent of multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), their efficacy in multimodal CD is hindered by two primary limitations: (1) difficulty in exploring intra- and inter-modal interactions for comprehensive causal variable identification; and (2) insufficiency to handle structural ambiguities with purely observational data. To address these challenges, we propose MLLM-CD, a novel framework for multimodal causal discovery from unstructured data. It consists of three key components: (1) a novel contrastive factor discovery module to identify genuine multimodal factors based on the interactions explored from contrastive sample pairs; (2) a statistical causal structure discovery module to infer causal relationships among discovered factors; and (3) an iterative multimodal counterfactual reasoning module to refine the discovery outcomes iteratively by incorporating the world knowledge and reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MLLM-CD in revealing genuine factors and causal relationships among them from multimodal unstructured data. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_17784 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Revealing Multimodal Causality with Large Language Models Li, Jin Wang, Shoujin Zhang, Qi Liu, Feng Liu, Tongliang Cao, Longbing Yu, Shui Chen, Fang Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Uncovering cause-and-effect mechanisms from data is fundamental to scientific progress. While large language models (LLMs) show promise for enhancing causal discovery (CD) from unstructured data, their application to the increasingly prevalent multimodal setting remains a critical challenge. Even with the advent of multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), their efficacy in multimodal CD is hindered by two primary limitations: (1) difficulty in exploring intra- and inter-modal interactions for comprehensive causal variable identification; and (2) insufficiency to handle structural ambiguities with purely observational data. To address these challenges, we propose MLLM-CD, a novel framework for multimodal causal discovery from unstructured data. It consists of three key components: (1) a novel contrastive factor discovery module to identify genuine multimodal factors based on the interactions explored from contrastive sample pairs; (2) a statistical causal structure discovery module to infer causal relationships among discovered factors; and (3) an iterative multimodal counterfactual reasoning module to refine the discovery outcomes iteratively by incorporating the world knowledge and reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MLLM-CD in revealing genuine factors and causal relationships among them from multimodal unstructured data. |
| title | Revealing Multimodal Causality with Large Language Models |
| topic | Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17784 |