The Abstraction Gap in Vision-Language Causal Reasoning

Abstract

Vision-language models (VLMs) generate fluent causal explanations, but current evaluations cannot distinguish linguistic plausibility from faithful causal reasoning. We introduce a dual-probe methodology that isolates these properties. The Text-Only Probe measures linguistic quality. The Chain-Text Probe requires models to first generate explicit causal chains. The Abstraction Gap (AG) metric quantifies the normalized performance difference. Evaluating eight VLMs on CAGE (Causal Abstraction Gap Evaluation), a benchmark of 49,500 questions across 5,500 images spanning Pearl's causal hierarchy, we find seven models exhibit AG exceeding 0.50 with text scores of 6--8 but chain scores below 2.5. Fine-tuning on 45,000 chain-annotated examples fails to close the gap. However, one model achieves near-zero AG. The capability exists within current VLM architectures and depends on pretraining and architectural choices. CAGE provides a diagnostic tool for assessing faithful causal reasoning in VLMs.