Related papers: Responsibility and blame: a structural-model appro…
Reputation is generally defined as the opinion of a group on an aspect of a thing. This paper presents a reputation model that follows a probabilistic modelling of opinions based on three main concepts: (1) the value of an opinion decays…
To model is to represent. The threshold of decidability defines two epistemological choices: one model (or a finite number of models) suffices for representing the dynamics below the undecidable; above this threshold (defined as…
Why do some physical systems possess consciousness, while others do not? Is this a question of physics? Or is it a question of the theory of causation? Physics and the theory of causation serve different descriptive purposes, and in this…
The purpose of this paper is to introduce a notion of causality in Markov decision processes based on the probability-raising principle and to analyze its algorithmic properties. The latter includes algorithms for checking cause-effect…
Much of our experiments are designed to uncover the cause(s) and effect(s) behind a data generating mechanism (i.e., phenomenon) we happen to be interested in. Uncovering such relationships allows us to identify the true working of a…
Understanding the predictions made by deep learning models remains a central challenge, especially in high-stakes applications. A promising approach is to equip models with the ability to answer counterfactual questions -- hypothetical…
With recent advances in natural language processing, rationalization becomes an essential self-explaining diagram to disentangle the black box by selecting a subset of input texts to account for the major variation in prediction. Yet,…
How do we ascribe subjective probability? In decision theory, this question is often addressed by representation theorems, going back to Ramsey (1926), which tell us how to define or measure subjective probability by observable preferences.…
Making a decision is often a matter of listing and comparing positive and negative arguments. In such cases, the evaluation scale for decisions should be considered bipolar, that is, negative and positive values should be explicitly…
Methods for causal inference are well developed for binary and continuous exposures, but in many settings, the exposure has a substantial mass at zero-such exposures are called semi-continuous. We propose a general causal framework for such…
Causal abstraction provides a theory describing how several causal models can represent the same system at different levels of detail. Existing theoretical proposals limit the analysis of abstract models to "hard" interventions fixing…
Argumentation is a formalism allowing to reason with contradictory information by modeling arguments and their interactions. There are now an increasing number of gradual semantics and impact measures that have emerged to facilitate the…
A person is directly racially discriminated against only if her race caused her worse treatment. This implies that race is an attribute sufficiently separable from other attributes to isolate its causal role. But race is embedded in a nexus…
Reverse causality is a common causal misperception that distorts the evaluation of private actions and public policies. This paper explores the implications of this error when a decision maker acts on it and therefore affects the very…
While initial versions of Bell's theorem captured the notion of locality with the assumption of factorizability, in later presentations, Bell argued that factorizability could be derived from the more fundamental principle of local…
At the heart of causal structure learning from observational data lies a deceivingly simple question: given two statistically dependent random variables, which one has a causal effect on the other? This is impossible to answer using…
We present several philosophical ideas emerging from the studies of complex systems. We make a brief introduction to the basic concepts of complex systems, for then defining "abstraction levels". These are useful for representing…
A formalized and quantifiable responsibility score is a crucial component in many aspects of the development and application of multi-agent systems and autonomous agents. We can employ it to inform decision making processes based on ethical…
We describe basic ideas underlying research to build and understand artificially intelligent systems: from symbolic approaches via statistical learning to interventional models relying on concepts of causality. Some of the hard open…
Many questions in Data Science are fundamentally causal in that our objective is to learn the effect of some exposure, randomized or not, on an outcome interest. Even studies that are seemingly non-causal, such as those with the goal of…