EvoSCM: Scientific Belief Revision Through Causal Model Evolution and Experimentation

Scientific agents must learn not only how to reason, but also what to believe. However, existing LLM agents typically express scientific hypotheses in free-form text, leaving their beliefs implicit and difficult to test or revise. We introduce EvoSCM, which equips scientific agents with explicit structural causal models that evolve as new experimental evidence is collected. EvoSCM maintains a population of competing SCM hypotheses, each encoding a candidate causal explanation of the environment, and evolves them through a closed discovery loop. In each round, the agent abduces latent mechanisms from accumulated evidence, designs discriminative interventions, and commits to falsifiable predictions that it tests through experimentation. Discrepancies between prediction and observation are inductively distilled into correction rules that revise the causal structures and mechanisms of each hypothesis, and the agent then deductively validates the revised population against accumulated evidence and structural consistency to guide the next round. We evaluate EvoSCM on DiscoverPhysics, a benchmark requiring agents to uncover the hidden dynamics of noncanonical physical worlds through experimentation. EvoSCM consistently improves scientific discovery over baselines, yielding more accurate explanations and predictions while making more effective use of experimental interactions.

Personalized Causal Recourse: A Human-In-The-Loop Approach

Algorithmic recourse addresses the challenge of providing tailored recommendations to users affected by unfavorable machine learning decisions, in potentially high-stakes scenarios. Traditional approaches to recourse often rely on the closest counterfactual explanations or assume a priori knowledge of a user's causal structure, resulting in interventions that overlook individual contexts and specific feature interactions. To overcome these limitations, we study a human-in-the-loop framework that iteratively approximates the user's structural causal model through interactive queries via Bayesian inference before producing recourse recommendations. This framework exploits humans' feedback to improve the identification of causal effects, allowing personalized recourse that is plausible, cost-effective, and aligned with the actual causal dependencies of each user. As a proof of concept, we evaluate this framework through simulated human responses. Our simulations across linear and non-linear causal models show promising results, though challenges remain in capturing complex, non-linear structures, emphasizing the importance of accurate approximations and robust noise distribution modeling.

Does Normalization Choice Matter for Causal Large Time-Series Models?

Large models for time-series forecasting have been emerged as a promising paradigm for training models on heterogeneous collections of signals. These models typically rely on causal autoregressive architectures, where each observation is sequentially predicted from past. In practice, real-world time-series exhibit non-stationarities, which significantly influence predictive performance. To mitigate this, normalization is commonly employed. However, in efficient causal settings it might induce information leakage from future observations during training. Recent alternatives, including causal normalization and statistics computed from initial observations, have been proposed to address this issue, but their practical implications remain insufficiently understood. In this work, we evaluate normalization strategies for transformer-based large time-series models trained with patching and efficient causal strategy. We showcase that normalization choice significantly influences both training convergence and forecasting performance.

Trivium: Temporal Regret as a First-Class Objective for Causal-Memory Controllers

Many current agentic systems and LLM pipelines correct mistakes by optimizing outcome reward. This addresses only the what of failure: when an outcome diverges from prediction, the why and when of the mismatch are not systematically logged, reviewed, or corrected, so the same error can recur episode after episode. We argue that this is a structural problem, not merely a model-capacity one. We propose long-horizon temporal regret as a first-class objective alongside outcome regret and epistemic regret over the working causal model. Temporal regret captures when failure persists: how long a miscalibrated causal model is tolerated before correction. Epistemic regret captures why failure persists: residual uncertainty or error in the working causal model. Together, the three regrets give a falsifiable account of what, why, and when a long-lived agent can fail. Modeling the agent as a stream of E episodes, we prove three conditional results under explicit causal-probing, persistence, and detectability assumptions. First, under observationally equivalent confounding, outcome-only learning cannot distinguish causal from spurious structure without an intervention channel, so temporal miscalibration can persist linearly even after outcome regret is driven to zero. Second, with a persistent causal log and budgeted probes, total probe complexity is logarithmic in the episode horizon, inducing O(log E) temporal regret. Third, under K detectable change-points, the rate extends to O(K log E). We instantiate Trivium and pre-register five falsifiable predictions. On CausalBench-Seq, Trivium follows the predicted logarithmic envelope while outcome-only baselines grow linearly. A pilot real-LLM stream provides preliminary external-validity evidence across one full E = 500 run and three E = 100 frontier-model pilots. Self-learning here means revising an external causal model, not retraining LLM weights.

Towards Neuro-symbolic Causal Rule Synthesis, Verification, and Evaluation Grounded in Legal and Safety Principles

Rule-based systems remain central in safety-critical domains but often struggle with scalability, brittleness, and goal misspecification. These limitations can lead to reward hacking and failures in formal verification, as AI systems tend to optimize for narrow objectives. In previous research, we developed a neuro-symbolic causal framework that integrates first-order logic abduction trees, structural causal models, and deep reinforcement learning within a MAPE-K loop to provide explainable adaptations under distribution shifts. In this paper, we extend that framework by introducing a meta-level layer designed to mitigate goal misspecification and support scalable rule maintenance. This layer consists of a Goal/Rule Synthesizer and a Rule Verification Engine, which iteratively refine a formal rule theory from high-level natural-language goals and principles provided by human experts. The synthesis pipeline employs large language models (LLMs) to: (1) decompose goals into candidate causes, (2) consolidate semantics to remove redundancies, (3) translate them into candidate first-order rules, and (4) compose necessary and sufficient causal sets. The verification pipeline then performs (1) syntax and schema validation, (2) logical consistency analysis, and (3) safety and invariant checks before integrating verified rules into the knowledge base. We evaluated our approach with a proof-of-concept implementation in two autonomous driving scenarios. Results indicate that, given human-specified goals and principles, the pipeline can successfully derive minimal necessary and sufficient rule sets and formalize them as logical constraints. These findings suggest that the pipeline supports incremental, modular, and traceable rule synthesis grounded in established legal and safety principles.