Related papers: What Causes a System to Satisfy a Specification?

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…

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…

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 Model Checkers have shown outstanding performance improvements in recent times. Moreover, for specific use cases, formal verification techniques have shown to be highly effective, leading to a number of high-profile success…

A definition of causality introduced by Halpern and Pearl, which uses structural equations, is reviewed. A more refined definition is then considered, which takes into account issues of normality and typicality, which are well known to…

Causality is typically treated an all-or-nothing concept; either A is a cause of B or it is not. We extend the definition of causality introduced by Halpern and Pearl [2001] to take into account the degree of responsibility of A for B. For…

Conformal prediction provides prediction sets with finite-sample marginal coverage, but many applications require coverage guarantees that adapt to individual test points, a subpopulation, or a structural component of the data. Existing…

Evaluating conditional coverage remains one of the most persistent challenges in assessing the reliability of predictive systems. Although conformal methods can give guarantees on marginal coverage, no method can guarantee to produce sets…

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…

Many objectives can be achieved (or may be achieved more effectively) only by a group of agents executing a team plan. If a team plan fails, it is often of interest to determine what caused the failure, the degree of responsibility of each…

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…

The malfunction of safety-critical systems may cause damage to people and the environment. Software within those systems is rigorously designed and verified according to domain specific guidance, such as ISO26262 for automotive safety. This…

Code coverage is a popular and widespread test adequacy metric that measures the percentage of program codes executed by a test suite. Despite its popularity, code coverage has several limitations. One of the major limitations is that it…

Pearl opened the door to formally defining actual causation using causal models. His approach rests on two strategies: first, capturing the widespread intuition that X=x causes Y=y iff X=x is a Necessary Element of a Sufficient Set for Y=y,…

We aim at measuring the influence of the nondeterministic choices of a part of a system on its ability to satisfy a specification. For this purpose, we apply the concept of Shapley values to verification as a means to evaluate how important…

Mainstream software applications and tools are the configurable platforms with an enormous number of parameters along with their values. Certain settings and possible interactions between these parameters may harden (or soften) the security…

Many methods of estimating causal models do not provide estimates of confidence in the resulting model. In this work, a metric is proposed for validating the output of a causal model fit; the robustness of the model structure with resampled…

When conducting inference on partially identified parameters, confidence regions may cover the whole identified set with a prescribed probability, to which we will refer as set coverage, or they may cover each of its point with a prescribed…

Accountability is the property of a system that enables the uncovering of causes for events and helps understand who or what is responsible for these events. Definitions and interpretations of accountability differ; however, they are…

Traditionally, practitioners use formal methods pre-dominately for one half of the quality-assurance process: verification (do we build the software right?). The other half -- validation (do we build the right software?) -- has been given…