LLMs can draw DAGs but can't guarantee d-separation, notebook discussion

fdellaert · x · 2026-09-21

A technical exchange on LLMs doing Bayesian network structure learning. @jatingargiitk notes an LLM can specify the structure if given examples and variable names, but the harder part is making it respect conditional independence without violating d-separation rules.

Frank Dellaert replies that the notebook performs a search over DAGs, so the distribution is factorized over the selected graph with d-separation holding by construction — but that does not mean it finds the right graph. The search guarantees graph-decomposition consistency, not correctness of the causal structure.

Related event: LLMs can draft DAGs but can't guarantee d-separation(2 posts)→

Original post →

More from Research

Research channel →