Inducing Causal World Models in LLMs for Zero-Shot Physical Reasoning (2507.19855v3)

Abstract: LLMs, despite their advanced linguistic capabilities, fundamentally lack an intuitive understanding of physical dynamics, which limits their effectiveness in real-world scenarios that require causal reasoning. In this paper, we introduce Causal World Model Induction (CWMI), a novel framework designed to embed an explicit model of causal physics within an LLM. Our approach incorporates a dedicated Causal Physics Module (CPM) and a new training objective called Causal Intervention Loss, encouraging the model to learn cause-and-effect relationships from multimodal data. By training the model to predict the outcomes of hypothetical interventions instead of merely capturing statistical correlations, CWMI develops a robust internal representation of physical laws. Experimental results show that CWMI significantly outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs on zero-shot physical reasoning tasks, including the PIQA benchmark and our newly proposed PhysiCa-Bench dataset. These findings demonstrate that inducing a causal world model is a critical step toward more reliable and generalizable AI systems.

• The paper introduces the CWMI framework that integrates a Causal Physics Module (CPM) to infuse causal understanding into LLMs.
• It employs dual loss functions, L_pred and L_causal, achieving 94.1% accuracy on PhysiCa-Bench and outperforming state-of-the-art models.
• Ablation studies confirm the necessity of both observational accuracy and causal reasoning for robust zero-shot physical reasoning.

Inducing Causal World Models in LLMs for Zero-Shot Physical Reasoning

Introduction

The paper "Inducing Causal World Models in LLMs for Zero-Shot Physical Reasoning" addresses the fundamental limitation of LLMs in understanding physical dynamics essential for causal reasoning. This work introduces the Causal World Model Induction (CWMI) framework, which embeds a specialized Causal Physics Module (CPM) into an LLM, thereby embedding explicit models of causal physics. The approach leverages a Causal Intervention Loss to enhance the learning of cause-and-effect relationships, enabling the model to predict hypothetical interventions, thereby attaining a robust internal representation of physical laws.

Figure 1: Rich, icon‑enhanced flowchart of the CWMI framework. The diagram illustrates the sequence of operations—from “Input Text” through “LLM Encoding,” “Projection Layer,” “Causal Physics Module,” to final “Output”—with color-coded modules.

Methodology

System Architecture

The CWMI framework consists of a frozen LLM and a dynamically trainable CPM. The LLM serves as a linguistic interface, converting text into semantic representations. These representations initialize the CPM, which then simulates physical interactions to predict future states.

Figure 2: The overall architecture of the Causal World Model Induction (CWMI) framework.

The CPM, structured as a Transformer decoder, utilizes self-attention mechanisms to model interactions. It predicts final states by simulating temporal evolution under the governing causal laws. Training involves backpropagating through a composite loss combining predictive accuracy and causal inference.

Causal Induction and Loss

The CWMI utilizes a dual-function loss:

• State Prediction Loss ($L_{pred}$): Anchors model predictions to observed realities using an MSE between predicted and ground-truth states.
• Causal Intervention Loss ($L_{causal}$): Focuses on learning causal mechanisms by observing the effects of interventions, using factual and counterfactual scenarios from the PhysiCa-Bench dataset.

Experimental Evaluation

Performance Analysis

The CWMI framework excels in zero-shot settings, outperforming state-of-the-art models on both PIQA and PhysiCa-Bench benchmarks.

Figure 3: Zero-Shot Reasoning Accuracy on PIQA.

CWMI achieved a 94.1% accuracy on PhysiCa-Bench with an FSPA of 0.08 and a Causal Consistency Score (CCS) of 87.6%, significantly outpacing GPT-4, highlighting the framework's robust causal reasoning capabilities.

Figure 4: CWMI Performance vs CPM Capacity: Causal Consistency Score

Ablation Studies

Ablations confirm the necessity of each component. Without $L_{causal}$, causal reasoning drops drastically, indicating its centrality. Conversely, omitting $L_{pred}$ results in ungrounded predictions, emphasizing its role in ensuring observational accuracy. The architectural separation between the LLM and CPM is validated by the abysmal performance of a model lacking the CPM.

Implications and Future Directions

CWMI significantly advances AI towards achieving robust physical reasoning by instilling a causal understanding within LLMs. Future explorations could focus on expanding CPM to handle complex physics like fluid dynamics and improving multi-object interaction handling. This work signifies a pivotal step towards creating LLMs capable of not just understanding, but reasoning about the physical world effectively.

Conclusion

The introduction of CWMI demonstrates a method for overcoming LLM limitations in physical reasoning by employing a causal world model. This framework shows notable improvements in understanding and predicting physical interactions in a zero-shot context, setting a new standard in AI's capability to integrate language and causal reasoning effectively.