Related papers: Program Actions as Actual Causes: A Building Block…
A security policy states the acceptable actions of an information system, as the actions bear on security. There is a pressing need for organizations to declare their security policies, even informal statements would be better than the…
Control code is a concept that is closely related to a frequently occurring practitioner's view on what is a program: code that is capable of controlling the behaviour of some machine. We present a logical approach to explain issues…
This paper concerns the probabilistic evaluation of the effects of actions in the presence of unmeasured variables. We show that the identification of causal effect between a singleton variable X and a set of variables Y can be accomplished…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms often struggle to learn policies that generalize to novel situations due to issues such as causal confusion, overfitting to irrelevant factors, and failure to isolate control of state factors. These…
Models of actual causality leverage domain knowledge to generate convincing diagnoses of events that caused an outcome. It is promising to apply these models to diagnose and repair run-time property violations in cyber-physical systems…
Distributed storage systems and databases are widely used by various types of applications. Transactional access to these storage systems is an important abstraction allowing application programmers to consider blocks of actions (i.e.,…
Computer-use agents have rapidly improved on real-world tasks such as web navigation, desktop automation, and software interaction, in some cases surpassing human performance. Yet even when the task and model are unchanged, an agent that…
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) such as autonomous cars, aircraft, and robots are often also safety-critical; thus it is imperative that they operate as intended with a high degree of certainty. Formal verification has been employed to verify…
We study a variant of the principal-agent problem in which the principal does not directly observe the agent's effort outcome; rather, she gets a signal about the agent's action according to a variable information structure designed by a…
A key challenge for the safety of advanced AI systems is the possibility that multiple simpler agents might inadvertently form a collective agent with capabilities and goals distinct from those of any individual. More generally, determining…
Transparency and explainability are important features that responsible autonomous vehicles should possess, particularly when interacting with humans, and causal reasoning offers a strong basis to provide these qualities. However, even if…
Accurate programming is a practical approach to producing high quality programs. It combines ideas from test-automation, test-driven development, agile programming, and other state of the art software development methods. In addition to…
Autonomous agents are supposed to be able to finish tasks or achieve goals that are assigned by their users through performing a sequence of actions. Since there might exist multiple plans that an agent can follow and each plan might…
Reading code is an essential activity in software maintenance and evolution. Several studies with human subjects have investigated how different factors, such as the employed programming constructs and naming conventions, can impact code…
Software security has been an important research topic over the years. The community has proposed processes and tools for secure software development and security analysis. However, a significant number of vulnerabilities remains in…
Large language models possess impressive capabilities in generating programs (e.g., Python) from natural language descriptions to execute robotic tasks. However, these generated programs often contain errors that violate externally given…
Multi-agent models are a suitable starting point to model complex social interactions. However, as the complexity of the systems increase, we argue that novel modeling approaches are needed that can deal with inter-dependencies at different…
The problem of checking whether two programs are semantically equivalent or not has a diverse range of applications, and is consequently of substantial importance. There are several techniques that address this problem, chiefly by…
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…
For software interacting directly with real-world end-users, it is common practice to script scenario tests validating the system's compliance with a number of its features. However, these do not accommodate the replication of the type of…