{"ID":2875735,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01136","arxiv_id":"2509.01136","title":"Heads or Tails: A Simple Example of Causal Abstractive Simulation","abstract":"This note illustrates how a variety of causal abstraction arXiv:1707.00819 arXiv:1812.03789, defined here as causal abstractive simulation, can be used to formalize a simple example of language model simulation. This note considers the case of simulating a fair coin toss with a language model. Examples are presented illustrating the ways language models can fail to simulate, and a success case is presented, illustrating how this formalism may be used to prove that a language model simulates some other system, given a causal description of the system. This note may be of interest to three groups. For practitioners in the growing field of language model simulation, causal abstractive simulation is a means to connect ad-hoc statistical benchmarking practices to the solid formal foundation of causality. Philosophers of AI and philosophers of mind may be interested as causal abstractive simulation gives a precise operationalization to the idea that language models are role-playing arXiv:2402.12422. Mathematicians and others working on causal abstraction may be interested to see a new application of the core ideas that yields a new variation of causal abstraction.","short_abstract":"This note illustrates how a variety of causal abstraction arXiv:1707.00819 arXiv:1812.03789, defined here as causal abstractive simulation, can be used to formalize a simple example of language model simulation. This note considers the case of simulating a fair coin toss with a language model. Examples are presented il...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01136","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01136v1","authors":"[\"Gabriel Simmons\"]","published":"2025-09-01T05:10:02Z","proceeding":"cs.AI","tasks":"[\"cs.AI\"]","methods":"[\"Language Model\"]","has_code":false}