CauProphet: Teaching Agents to Develop Causal Cognition like Humans

Abstract

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly support long-horizon tasks by leveraging external memory and past experience. However, existing agents mainly retrieve records or summaries, lacking the ability to form and refine causal understanding of the world. Inspired by human causal cognition, we introduce CauProphet, an agent that develops and updates causal knowledge within its Causal Cognition. For each task, CauProphet combines relevant knowledge in Causal Cognition with current evidence to construct a Causal Belief, a structured belief capturing causal factors and the effects of possible actions. It uses this belief for decision-making and continuously updates both the belief and Causal Cognition as new observations emerge, enabling causal knowledge that persists beyond individual experiences. Evaluations demonstrate that CauProphet progressively acquires causal knowledge and transfers it to future decision-making. In financial research, CauProphet leverages prior discoveries to improve downstream analyses and outperforms all baselines in mean rank correlation with next-day returns, achieving a 25.4% improvement over a baseline agent. It also improves prediction accuracy from 21.3% to 28.6% in dynamic real-world settings. Further experiments validate its ability to perform reliable causal analysis and action selection across scientific and everyday tasks, demonstrating the potential of causal experience learning for next-generation LLM agents.