Federal Project Grant Award Summary

Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) received a $420,000 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Computing and Communication Foundations under the Computer and Information Science and Engineering program (CFDA 47.070), effective October 1, 2026, with completion by September 30, 2031. This CAREER award supports fundamental research to advance foundation models—large artificial intelligence systems trained on vast datasets—by enabling them to better understand and reason about causal relationships rather than relying solely on statistical correlations. The project addresses a critical limitation in current AI systems used in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, education, and environmental planning, where causal misinterpretation can lead to unreliable outputs.

The research delivers a systematic framework organized into multiple complementary thrusts that interpret, leverage, edit, and apply causal knowledge within foundation models. The first thrust develops methods to identify and analyze causal relationships embedded in large-scale language, vision, and multimodal models. The second thrust designs approaches to integrate external causal knowledge into model reasoning to improve performance on tasks including question answering, causal reasoning, and video understanding. By enhancing the causal reasoning capabilities of foundation models, this project aims to increase AI reliability and transparency, strengthen decision-making in complex environments, and support workforce development in trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI).