In Large Language Model (LLM) training, data mixing plays a pivotal role in determining model performance. Recent methods optimize mixture weights via proxy models, but they rely on the assumption of static data distributions. As a result, when the underlying data pool shifts, these methods require costly retraining from scratch. This limitation restricts their ability to scale seamlessly from small settings to larger data pools and model sizes. In this paper, we propose CausalMix to address this limitation by casting data mixture optimization as a causal inference problem. We formulate the statistical features of the data pool as covariates and the domain mixture as the treatment. After fitting a causal model on 512 runs of Qwen2.5-0.5B to estimate the Conditional Average Treatment Effect (CATE), we extrapolate the optimal mixture for an 800K data pool and apply it to train a 7B model. Furthermore, we successfully generalize the framework to long chain-of-thought data on Qwen3-4B-Base. By leveraging causal modeling to isolate confounding biases, CausalMix infers state-dependent data mixtures offline, with the selected mixture fixed during each training run. Extensive experiments show that the mixture guided by CausalMix achieves competitive performance across downstream tasks compared with other baselines. The CATE Interpreter visualizes the learned mixing strategy. Overall, CausalMix offers a causal and interpretable framework for optimizing LLM data mixtures.
Zhiqing Cui Reading University and Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Binwu Wang University of Science and Technology of China, Qingxiang Liu, Yeqiang Wang Northwest A&F University, Zhengyang Zhou, Yuxuan Liang The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Yang Wang University of Science and Technology of China
Large language models (LLM) have emerged as a promising avenue for time series forecasting, offering the potential to integrate multimodal data. However, existing LLM-based approaches face notable limitations—such as marginalized role in model architectures, reliance on coarse statistical text prompts, and lack of interpretability. In this work, we introduce Augur, a fully LLM driven time series forecasting framework that exploits LLM causal reasoning to discover and use directed causal associations among covariates. Augur uses a two stage teacher student architecture where a powerful teacher LLM infers a directed causal graph from time series using heuristic search together with pairwise causality testing. A lightweight student agent then refines the graph and fine tune on high confidence causal associations that are encoded as rich textual prompts to perform forecasting. This design improves predictive accuracy while yielding transparent, traceable reasoning about variable interactions. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets with 25 baselines demonstrate that Augur achieves competitive performance and robust zero-shot generalization.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Shaoqi Wang, Lu Yu Ant Group, Siwei Lou, Feng Yan, Chunjie Yang Zhejiang University, Qing Cui, Jun Zhou Ant Group
Statement autoformalization, a crucial first step in formal verification, aims to transform informal descriptions of math problems into machine-verifiable formal representations but remains a significant challenge. The core difficulty lies in the fact that existing language models hallucinate formal dependencies, including missing or incorrect definitions, lemmas, and theorems. Current dependency retrieval approaches exhibit poor precision and recall, and lack the scalability to leverage ever-growing public datasets. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel retrieval-augmented framework based on Direct Dependency Retrieval (DDR). DDR directly generates candidate formal dependencies from natural-language mathematical descriptions and verifies their existence in the formal library via an efficient Suffix Array Check (SAC). Built on a SAC-constructed dependency retrieval dataset of over 500,000 samples, a high-precision DDR model is fine-tuned and shown to significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods in both retrieval precision and recall, leading to superior advantage in the autoformalization tasks. SAC also contributes in assessing formalization difficulty and enabling explicit quantification of the hallucination in In-Context Learning (ICL).
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表