MaSCoD: A Multi-Agent Framework for Structural-Context-Guided Candidate Causal Graph Generation

RESUMO

Large language models (LLMs) have been applied to causal discovery, but candidate-graph generation rarely treats premature omission of potentially relevant causal relations as an explicit design objective. We propose MaSCoD, a multi-agent framework that organizes candidate third variables and local structural patterns before direct-edge judgment. We evaluate MaSCoD on Auto-MPG, DWD, and Sachs using GPT-5.4 as the primary backbone and GPT-4o for replication. MaSCoD exhibits a dataset- and backbone-dependent retention-selectivity profile rather than uniform superiority. Across all six dataset-backbone settings, Full, which supplies structural hypotheses before direct-edge judgment, achieved higher mean Recall and F1 than No Phase 1, which instead constructs them within the judgment procedure, while also increasing false-positive rates. Additional reference-edge retention over all evaluated baselines was observed on DWD with GPT-5.4 and on Sachs with GPT-4o, rather than uniformly across settings. Partial ablations showed that supplying both information components did not always outperform supplying only one. For GPT-5.4, stage-wise analysis showed that the Full-No Phase 1 retention gap was already present after direct-edge judgment, while reconciliation introduced additional reference-edge loss for Full on Sachs. These findings support structural pre-organization as an explicit design and evaluation target for omission control and motivate evaluating context construction jointly with its utilization in judgment.