[Paper] Correlation Is Not Enough: Embedding Human Metadata for Individual Causal Discovery

Source: arXiv - 2606.09672v1

Overview

Ask a pretrained biomedical language model whether “cortisol 28 ug/dL” and “stock-market volatility” are related, and it returns a cosine similarity of 0.83 on a scale where 1.0 means identical. The two share no mechanism. This is not a corner case: every off-the-shelf biomedical encoder we tested (BioBERT, PubMedBERT, BioM-ELECTRA) scores unrelated cross-domain pairs between 0.76 and 0.92 when the answer should be near zero. Accuracy on cross-domain discrimination is 0%. Retrieval systems survive this, because a language model downstream filters the noise. A Large Behavioural Model (LBM), a foundation model whose subject is a person rather than a sentence, does not: it reasons over a graph of a user’s life and treats embedding proximity as evidence that two events are causally linked. False proximity writes a false causal edge, and everything downstream inherits the error. Here, embedding geometry is not a tuning knob; it is correctness. We report the fix. A contrastive pass over 72,034 pairs raises PubMedBERT BIOSSES correlation from 0.633 to 0.828 and within-vs-across-domain separation from 1.05x to 1.63x. A second pass, BODHI, mines hard negatives from edges absent in a biomedical knowledge graph and lifts separation to 2.30x and the discrimination gap to +0.392, at a 4.5% BIOSSES cost. On an Intel Xeon 6737P with AMX, OpenVINO cuts single-query latency from 1367 ms to 10 ms (133x) and reaches 555 sentences/sec. One finding contradicts standard advice: FP16 beats INT8 on this silicon at every serving batch size, and we explain why. The same model on a no-AMX Ice Lake instance runs 13-27x slower. We release the benchmark suite, training corpora, the BODHI generator, and the OpenVINO scripts.

Key Contributions

This paper presents research in the following areas:

• cs.AI
• cs.CL
• cs.LG
• cs.PF
• q-bio.QM

Methodology

Please refer to the full paper for detailed methodology.

Practical Implications

This research contributes to the advancement of cs.AI.

Authors

• Suraj Biswas
• Saurabh Gupta
• Pritam Mukherjee

Paper Information

• arXiv ID: 2606.09672v1
• Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG, cs.PF, q-bio.QM
• Published: June 8, 2026
• PDF: Download PDF