Causal Graph Modeling with Deep Neural Engines for Strong Abstract Reasoning in Language and Vision

Deep learning (DL) relies on discovering correlation patterns in low-level data and aggregating the information to solve a task. Despite success in a wide variety of applications, ranging from natural language to vision tasks, the learned patterns are often brittle and do not transfer out of the training data distribution (i.e. to different domains). Causality theory proposes methods to discover and estimate cause-effect relationships beyond correlations. Its powerful inference frameworks have been recently highlighted as a potential way to improve the lack of out-of-distribution generalisation in deep neural networks. However, their applications to deep learning problems remain largely under-explored. Our work attempts to bridge this gap and apply causal graphical models to abstract and causal reasoning problems in natural language and vision, requiring strong generalisation abilities beyond correlations. We integrate causal graph modelling methods into deep vision networks and Large Language Models to improve their capacity to perform strong and out-of-distribution reasoning on complex abstract problems.