Reasoning Models Are Accurate but Unsound on Identification

Abstract

A reasoning model asked whether a causal effect is recoverable from observational data can fail in two ways: it refuses an identifiable query or answers a nonidentifiable one. The latter is more consequential, as no observational data can validate the claimed formula. Measuring this failure requires queries that are provably non-identifiable, which prior evaluations lack, and grading that accepts correct formulas in any equivalent form, which string matching cannot provide. We build CERTID, a formal identification pipeline that addresses both limitations. CERTID uses the sound and complete causal identification algorithm ID to certify whether an effect is identifiable from a given graph and query, and verifies returned formulas against structural causal models whose interventional distributions are known exactly. CERTID further develops theoretical results to mitigate structural leakage, repair non-identifiable queries, and establish grading guarantees. We evaluate three frontier reasoning models (Gemini Flash, Gemini Pro, and GPT5.5) on 1,200 certified instances spanning 4 to 50 vertices. Accuracy proves a poor proxy for soundness: on identical instances, the false-claim rate on non-identifiable queries varies by seventeen-fold across models. We also find that models decide identifiability with 97-100% accuracy on graphs generated after the strongest model's training snapshot. Instances, the certification procedure, the verifier, and per-instance records are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/certid-D718.

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