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#1 Causal-LLM: Towards Predictive and Interpretable Spatiotemporal Foundation Models [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Author: Zhiqing Cui

Spatiotemporal forecasting has seen remarkable progress with the advent of deep learning, particularly with Spatiotemporal Graph Neural Networks (STGNNs). These models excel at answering the what question: predicting future numerical values with high accuracy. However, they fail to answer the crucial why question. In high-stakes domains such as meteorology, urban planning, and public health, this opacity creates a critical bottleneck for adoption. A model that predicts a severe pollution event without explaining its atmospheric drivers is a black box, limiting its trustworthiness and utility for decision-makers who need actionable, causal insights. To address this critical gap, I propose a long-term research project to develop Causal-LLM, a new class of foundation models for spatiotemporal data that are both predictively powerful and causally interpretable. My central thesis is that genuine interpretability cannot be an afterthought; it must be designed into the model's core learning process. By adapting the powerful Time-LLM reprogramming framework and introducing a novel training methodology I term causal data synthesis, Causal-LLM will learn to not only forecast future states but also to articulate the human-understandable causal narratives behind them. This research will make two primary contributions: (1) a novel hybrid architecture that synergizes the perceptual power of GNNs with the reasoning capabilities of LLMs for complex physical systems, and (2) a new training paradigm that explicitly teaches this mapping. A successful project would provide a blueprint for a new class of trustworthy foundation models for science, enabling applications such as a climate model that not only predicts a flood but also explains the atmospheric river causing it, empowering authorities to make more informed and trusted decisions.

Subject: AAAI.2026 - Undergraduate Consortium