CIP: A Plug-and-Play Causal Prompting Framework for Mitigating Hallucinations under Long-Context Noise

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Hauptverfasser: Ma, Qingsen, Wang, Dianyun, Jing, Ran, Sun, Yujun, Xu, Zhenbo
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Ma, Qingsen
Wang, Dianyun
Jing, Ran
Sun, Yujun
Xu, Zhenbo
author_facet Ma, Qingsen
Wang, Dianyun
Jing, Ran
Sun, Yujun
Xu, Zhenbo
contents Large language models often hallucinate when processing long and noisy retrieval contexts because they rely on spurious correlations rather than genuine causal relationships. We propose CIP, a lightweight and plug-and-play causal prompting framework that mitigates hallucinations at the input stage. CIP constructs a causal relation sequence among entities, actions, and events and injects it into the prompt to guide reasoning toward causally relevant evidence. Through causal intervention and counterfactual reasoning, CIP suppresses non causal reasoning paths, improving factual grounding and interpretability. Experiments across seven mainstream language models, including GPT-4o, Gemini 2.0 Flash, and Llama 3.1, show that CIP consistently enhances reasoning quality and reliability, achieving 2.6 points improvement in Attributable Rate, 0.38 improvement in Causal Consistency Score, and a fourfold increase in effective information density. API level profiling further shows that CIP accelerates contextual understanding and reduces end to end response latency by up to 55.1 percent. These results suggest that causal reasoning may serve as a promising paradigm for improving the explainability, stability, and efficiency of large language models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_11282
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CIP: A Plug-and-Play Causal Prompting Framework for Mitigating Hallucinations under Long-Context Noise
Ma, Qingsen
Wang, Dianyun
Jing, Ran
Sun, Yujun
Xu, Zhenbo
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large language models often hallucinate when processing long and noisy retrieval contexts because they rely on spurious correlations rather than genuine causal relationships. We propose CIP, a lightweight and plug-and-play causal prompting framework that mitigates hallucinations at the input stage. CIP constructs a causal relation sequence among entities, actions, and events and injects it into the prompt to guide reasoning toward causally relevant evidence. Through causal intervention and counterfactual reasoning, CIP suppresses non causal reasoning paths, improving factual grounding and interpretability. Experiments across seven mainstream language models, including GPT-4o, Gemini 2.0 Flash, and Llama 3.1, show that CIP consistently enhances reasoning quality and reliability, achieving 2.6 points improvement in Attributable Rate, 0.38 improvement in Causal Consistency Score, and a fourfold increase in effective information density. API level profiling further shows that CIP accelerates contextual understanding and reduces end to end response latency by up to 55.1 percent. These results suggest that causal reasoning may serve as a promising paradigm for improving the explainability, stability, and efficiency of large language models.
title CIP: A Plug-and-Play Causal Prompting Framework for Mitigating Hallucinations under Long-Context Noise
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.11282