Do-PFN: In-Context Learning for Causal Effect Estimation

Jake Robertson, Arik Reuter, Siyuan Guo, Noah Hollmann, Frank Hutter, Bernhard Schölkopf

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Main Conference Track

Causal effect estimation is critical to a range of scientific disciplines. Existing methods for this task either require interventional data, knowledge about the ground-truth causal graph, or rely on assumptions such as unconfoundedness, restricting their applicability in real-world settings. In the domain of tabular machine learning, Prior-data fitted networks (PFNs) have achieved state-of-the-art predictive performance, having been pre-trained on synthetic causal data to solve tabular prediction problems via in-context learning. To assess whether this can be transferred to the problem of causal effect estimation, we pre-train PFNs on synthetic data drawn from a wide variety of causal structures, including interventions, to predict interventional outcomes given observational data. Through extensive experiments in synthetic and semi-synthetic settings, we show that our approach allows for the accurate estimation of causal effects without knowledge of the underlying causal graph.