CauSight: Learning to Supersense for Visual Causal Discovery
It addresses the challenge of enabling AI systems to infer cause-and-effect relations in visual scenes, which is incremental as it builds on existing vision-language and causal reasoning methods.
The paper tackles the problem of visual causal discovery by introducing a new task and dataset, VCG-32K, and developing CauSight, a vision-language model that outperforms GPT-4.1 with a threefold performance boost (21% absolute gain).
Causal thinking enables humans to understand not just what is seen, but why it happens. To replicate this capability in modern AI systems, we introduce the task of visual causal discovery. It requires models to infer cause-and-effect relations among visual entities across diverse scenarios instead of merely perceiving their presence. To this end, we first construct the Visual Causal Graph dataset (VCG-32K), a large-scale collection of over 32,000 images annotated with entity-level causal graphs, and further develop CauSight, a novel vision-language model to perform visual causal discovery through causally aware reasoning. Our training recipe integrates three components: (1) training data curation from VCG-32K, (2) Tree-of-Causal-Thought (ToCT) for synthesizing reasoning trajectories, and (3) reinforcement learning with a designed causal reward to refine the reasoning policy. Experiments show that CauSight outperforms GPT-4.1 on visual causal discovery, achieving over a threefold performance boost (21% absolute gain). Our code, model, and dataset are fully open-sourced at project page: https://github.com/OpenCausaLab/CauSight.