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Related papers: Counterfactual Causality from First Principles?

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This short paper compiles the big ideas behind some philosophical views, definitions, and examples of causality. This collection spans the realms of the four commonly adopted approaches to causality: Humes regularity, counterfactual,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-03-26 M. Z. Naser

Causal inference is a central goal across many scientific disciplines. Over the past several decades, three major frameworks have emerged to formalize causal questions and guide their analysis: the potential outcomes framework, structural…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-12 Linbo Wang , Thomas Richardson , James Robins

Reinforcement learning is an essential paradigm for solving sequential decision problems under uncertainty. Despite many remarkable achievements in recent decades, applying reinforcement learning methods in the real world remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-22 Zhihong Deng , Jing Jiang , Guodong Long , Chengqi Zhang

We describe the principles of counterfactual thinking in providing more precise definitions of causal effects and some of the implications of this work for the way in which causal questions in life course research are framed and evidence…

Applications · Statistics 2021-05-18 Bianca De Stavola , Moritz Herle , Andrew Pickles

There has been a growing interest in model-agnostic methods that can make deep learning models more transparent and explainable to a user. Some researchers recently argued that for a machine to achieve a certain degree of human-level…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Yu-Liang Chou , Catarina Moreira , Peter Bruza , Chun Ouyang , Joaquim Jorge

We describe and contrast two distinct problem areas for statistical causality: studying the likely effects of an intervention ("effects of causes"), and studying whether there is a causal link between the observed exposure and outcome in an…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-04-02 A. Philip Dawid , Monica Musio

Recent work on counterfactual visual explanations has contributed to making artificial intelligence models more explainable by providing visual perturbation to flip the prediction. However, these approaches neglect the causal relationships…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yiran Qiao , Disheng Liu , Yiren Lu , Yu Yin , Mengnan Du , Jing Ma

To make effective decisions, it is important to have a thorough understanding of the causal relationships among actions, environments, and outcomes. This review aims to surface three crucial aspects of decision-making through a causal lens:…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-22 Lin Ge , Hengrui Cai , Runzhe Wan , Yang Xu , Rui Song

Lewis' theory of counterfactuals is the foundation of many contemporary notions of causality. In this paper, we extend this theory in the temporal direction to enable symbolic counterfactual reasoning on infinite sequences, such as…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Bernd Finkbeiner , Julian Siber

Certain approaches to quantum gravity, such as the one based on the concept of purely virtual particles (fakeons), sacrifice the cause-effect relation at very small scales to reconcile renormalizability with unitarity. Other developments…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2026-05-01 Damiano Anselmi

Evaluation of counterfactual queries (e.g., "If A were true, would C have been true?") is important to fault diagnosis, planning, and determination of liability. In this paper we present methods for computing the probabilities of such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-02-28 Alexander Balke , Judea Pearl

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Clemens Dubslaff , Kallistos Weis , Christel Baier , Sven Apel

Counterfactual explanations are emerging as an attractive option for providing recourse to individuals adversely impacted by algorithmic decisions. As they are deployed in critical applications (e.g. law enforcement, financial lending), it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-05 Dylan Slack , Sophie Hilgard , Himabindu Lakkaraju , Sameer Singh

A recent trend of fair machine learning is to define fairness as causality-based notions which concern the causal connection between protected attributes and decisions. However, one common challenge of all causality-based fairness notions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Yongkai Wu , Lu Zhang , Xintao Wu , Hanghang Tong

Machine learning can impact people with legal or ethical consequences when it is used to automate decisions in areas such as insurance, lending, hiring, and predictive policing. In many of these scenarios, previous decisions have been made…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-03-09 Matt J. Kusner , Joshua R. Loftus , Chris Russell , Ricardo Silva

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in learning high-level causal representations from low-level image pairs under interventions. Yet, existing efforts are largely limited to simple synthetic settings that are far away from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Yuejiang Liu , Alexandre Alahi , Chris Russell , Max Horn , Dominik Zietlow , Bernhard Schölkopf , Francesco Locatello

We present a comprehensive language theoretic causality analysis framework for explaining safety property violations in the setting of concurrent reactive systems. Our framework allows us to uniformly express a number of causality notions…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2019-01-04 Rayna Dimitrova , Rupak Majumdar , Vinayak S. Prabhu

Transparency is a fundamental requirement for decision making systems when these should be deployed in the real world. It is usually achieved by providing explanations of the system's behavior. A prominent and intuitive type of explanations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-23 André Artelt , Valerie Vaquet , Riza Velioglu , Fabian Hinder , Johannes Brinkrolf , Malte Schilling , Barbara Hammer

With the rise of Large Language Models(LLMs), it has become crucial to understand their capabilities and limitations in deciphering and explaining the complex web of causal relationships that language entails. Current methods use either…

Understanding predictions made by deep neural networks is notoriously difficult, but also crucial to their dissemination. As all machine learning based methods, they are as good as their training data, and can also capture unwanted biases.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Amir Feder , Nadav Oved , Uri Shalit , Roi Reichart