Replicating TRACE: A Practitioner's Guide to Its Threshold and Particle Budget

Abstract

TRACE (Math&Lienhart, arXiv:2602.01135) reads causal graphs over event types out of a pretrained autoregressive sequence model by thresholding a per-position conditional-mutual-information estimate at a fixed tau. We independently replicate its headline synthetic result: with tau selected on a validation split, mean per-sequence F1 against exact interventional truth reaches 0.90-0.91 at vocabulary size 1000 (paper: 0.91) and 0.86-0.91 from 100 to 2000. First, the optimal threshold is pinned to the truth margin, not to any constant: at every size the errors at tau* straddle the delta = 0.05 margin defining ground truth (missed true edges lie just above it, accepted false ones just below), and the blind optimum lands near delta/2 times the estimator's calibration, confirmed out of sample at 5000. Second, at a single global threshold TRACE mostly recovers a direct, adjacent-influence graph: lag-1 true edges are recalled at 0.97-0.99, while true edges at lag 2 or more read orders of magnitude lower---the reading-scale price of randomizing mediating positions, which an exact test of direct causal effect requires when the truth is unknown. A per-lag threshold family recovers a third to a half of lag-2 truth; on lag-uniform data one validated threshold recalls every lag at 0.40-0.87, 8-26 pp below an atomic-intervention control at lags 3-6. Third, the default lag decay of the paper's synthetic benchmark concentrates about 85% of interventional truth at lag 1 and pushes the rest below the estimator's noise floor, so headline F1 there certifies lag-1 recovery only and conflates the benchmark's skew with the algorithm's own limit; a flatter decay separates the two. Fourth, F1 saturates from N = 2 particles at the selected threshold---a property of the threshold's margin over the noise floor, not of the estimator, which converges as N^(-1/2). We distill five practitioner rules.