Related papers: Defaults and Normality in Causal Structures
Causality is the relationship where one event contributes to the production of another, with the cause being partly responsible for the effect and the effect partly dependent on the cause. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective…
Understanding the root cause of a defect is critical to isolating and repairing buggy behavior. We present Causal Testing, a new method of root-cause analysis that relies on the theory of counterfactual causality to identify a set of…
The framework of Pearl's Causal Hierarchy (PCH) formalizes three types of reasoning: probabilistic (i.e. purely observational), interventional, and counterfactual, that reflect the progressive sophistication of human thought regarding…
Structural causal models are the basic modelling unit in Pearl's causal theory; in principle they allow us to solve counterfactuals, which are at the top rung of the ladder of causation. But they often contain latent variables that limit…
In (Beckers, 2025) I introduced nondeterministic causal models as a generalization of Pearl's standard deterministic causal models. I here take advantage of the increased expressivity offered by these models to offer a novel definition of…
In recent years the search for a proper formal definition of actual causation -- i.e., the relation of cause-effect as it is instantiated in specific observations, rather than general causal relations -- has taken on impressive proportions.…
In view of the growing complexity of modern software architectures, formal models are increasingly used to understand why a system works the way it does, opposed to simply verifying that it behaves as intended. This paper surveys approaches…
The design of scientific experiments deserves its own variation of formal verification to catch cases where scientists made important mistakes, such as forgetting to take confounding variables into account. One of the most fundamental…
Causation has been the issue of philosophic debate since Hippocrates. Recent work defines actual causation in terms of Pearl/Halpern's causality framework, formalizing necessary causes (IJCAI'15). This has inspired causality notions in the…
Interpretability research on large language models (LLMs) has yielded important insights into model behaviour, yet recurring pitfalls persist: findings that do not generalise, and causal interpretations that outrun the evidence. Our…
We study the complexity of satisfiability problems in probabilistic and causal reasoning. Given random variables $X_1, X_2,\ldots$ over finite domains, the basic terms are probabilities of propositional formulas over atomic events $X_i =…
To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP). In this paper we propose an extension of logic programming (LP) where each default literal derived from the well-founded model is associated to a justification represented as an…
This paper presents a sound and completecalculus for causal relevance, based onPearl's functional models semantics.The calculus consists of axioms and rulesof inference for reasoning about causalrelevance relationships.We extend the set of…
This paper presents a simple generalization of causal consistency suited to any object defined by a sequential specification. As causality is captured by a partial order on the set of operations issued by the processes on shared objects…
We propose a new definition of actual causes, using structural equations to model counterfactuals.We show that the definitions yield a plausible and elegant account ofcausation that handles well examples which have caused problems forother…
I generalize acyclic deterministic structural causal models to the nondeterministic case and argue that this offers an improved semantics for counterfactuals. The standard, deterministic, semantics developed by Halpern (and based on the…
The classical causal relations between a set of variables, some observed and some latent, can induce both equality constraints (typically conditional independences) as well as inequality constraints (Instrumental and Bell inequalities being…
This work extends Halpern and Pearl's causal models for actual causality to a possible world semantics environment. Using this framework we introduce a logic of actual causality with modal operators, which allows for reasoning about…
Contextuality was originally defined only for consistently connected systems of random variables (those without disturbance/signaling). Contextuality-by-Default theory (CbD) offers an extension of the notion of contextuality to…
Since Pearl's seminal work on providing a formal language for causality, the subject has garnered a lot of interest among philosophers and researchers in artificial intelligence alike. One of the most debated topics in this context regards…