Related papers: (De-)Composing Causality in Labeled Transition Sys…
Causal reasoning is essential for understanding decision-making about the behaviour of complex `ecosystems' of systems that underpin modern society, with security -- including issues around correctness, safety, resilience, etc. -- typically…
Thinking in terms of causality helps us structure how different parts of a system depend on each other, and how interventions on one part of a system may result in changes to other parts. Therefore, formal models of causality are an…
Perhaps the most prominent current definition of (actual) causality is due to Halpern and Pearl. It is defined using causal models (also known as structural equations models). We abstract the definition, extracting its key features, so that…
Detecting and understanding reasons for defects and inadvertent behavior in software is challenging due to their increasing complexity. In configurable software systems, the combinatorics that arises from the multitude of features a user…
In this abstract we propose a framework for explaining violations of safety properties in Software Defined Networks, using counterfactual causal reasoning.
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…
A serious defect with the Halpern-Pearl (HP) definition of causality is repaired by combining a theory of causality with a theory of defaults. In addition, it is shown that (despite a claim to the contrary) a cause according to the HP…
We present a formal theory for analysing causality in cyber-physical systems. To this end, we extend the theory of actual causality by Halpern and Pearl to cope with the continuous nature of cyber-physical systems. Based on our theory, we…
Causality has been the issue of philosophic debate since Hippocrates. It is used in formal verification and testing, e.g., to explain counterexamples or construct fault trees. Recent work defines actual causation in terms of Pearl's…
Causal models defined in terms of structural equations have proved to be quite a powerful way of representing knowledge regarding causality. However, a number of authors have given examples that seem to show that the Halpern-Pearl (HP)…
Investigations of causality in operational systems aim at providing human-understandable explanations of why a system behaves as it does. There is, in particular, a demand to explain what went wrong on a given counterexample execution that…
Investigations of causality in operational systems aim at providing human-understandable explanations of why a system behaves as it does. There is, in particular, a demand to explain what went wrong on a given counterexample execution that…
Concurrent systems identify systems, either software, hardware or even biological systems, that are characterized by sets of independent actions that can be executed in any order or simultaneously. Computer scientists resort to a causal…
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…
Causality plays an important role in daily processes, human reasoning, and artificial intelligence. There has however not been much research on causality in multi-agent strategic settings. In this work, we introduce a systematic way to…
The theory of actual causality, defined by Halpern and Pearl, and its quantitative measure - the degree of responsibility - was shown to be extremely useful in various areas of computer science due to a good match between the results it…
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…
We define a general notion of transition system where states and action labels can be from arbitrary nominal sets, actions may bind names, and state predicates from an arbitrary logic define properties of states. A Hennessy-Milner logic for…
We introduce an extension of team semantics which provides a framework for the logic of manipulationist theories of causation based on structural equation models, such as Woodward's and Pearl's; our causal teams incorporate (partial or…
One well motivated explanation method for classifiers leverages counterfactuals which are hypothetical events identical to real observations in all aspects except for one feature. Constructing such counterfactual poses specific challenges…