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Quantum mechanics---the theory describing the fundamental workings of nature---is famously counterintuitive: it predicts that a particle can be in two places at the same time, and that two remote particles can be inextricably and…

AI-driven outcomes can be challenging for end-users to understand. Explanations can address two key questions: "Why this outcome?" (factual) and "Why not another?" (counterfactual). While substantial efforts have been made to formalize…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Suryani Lim , Henri Prade , Gilles Richard

Post-hoc explanations of machine learning models are crucial for people to understand and act on algorithmic predictions. An intriguing class of explanations is through counterfactuals, hypothetical examples that show people how to obtain a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-09 Ramaravind Kommiya Mothilal , Amit Sharma , Chenhao Tan

Counterfactual communication, i.e., communication without particle travelling in the transmission channel, is a bizarre quantum effect. Starting from interaction-free measurements many protocols achieving various tasks from counterfactual…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2019-06-05 Lev Vaidman

Construal of observable facts or events, that is, the manner in which we understand reality, is based not only on mathematical formulas of a theory suggested as a reasonable explanation for physical phenomena (like general relativity or…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-07-19 Arkady Bolotin

A qualification is suggested for the counterfactual reasoning involved in some aspects of time-symmetric quantum theory (which involves ensembles selected by both the initial and final states). The qualification is that the counterfactual…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 D. J. Miller

In this paper, following an elementary line of thought which somewhat differs from the usual one, we prove once more that any deterministic theory predictively equivalent to quantum mechanics unavoidably exhibits a contextual character. The…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2009-11-13 GianCarlo Ghirardi , Karl Wienand

Counterfactual decision-making in the face of uncertainty involves selecting the optimal action from several alternatives using causal reasoning. Decision-makers often rank expected potential outcomes (or their corresponding utility and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Yuta Kawakami , Jin Tian

The counterfactuality of recently proposed protocols is analyzed. A definition of `counterfactuality' is offered and it is argued that an interaction-free measurement of the presence of an opaque object can be named `counterfactual', while…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2016-05-10 Lev Vaidman

Counterfactual explanations is one of the post-hoc methods used to provide explainability to machine learning models that have been attracting attention in recent years. Most examples in the literature, address the problem of generating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Guillermo Navas-Palencia

This paper investigates the problem of bounding possible output from a counterfactual query given a set of observational data. While various works of literature have described methodologies to generate efficient algorithms that provide an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-02 Aditya Kelvianto Sidharta

A crucial input into causal inference is the imputed counterfactual outcome. Imputation error can arise because of sampling uncertainty from estimating the prediction model using the untreated observations, or from out-of-sample information…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-05-20 Silvia Goncalves , Serena Ng

An intense effort is being made today to build a quantum computer. Instead of presenting what has been achieved, I invoke here analogies from the history of science in an attempt to glimpse what the future might hold. Quantum computing is…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2011-10-17 G. S. Paraoanu

A recent quantum protocol for counterfactual communication [Y. Aharonov and L. Vaidman, Phys. Rev. A 99, 010103(R), 2019] relies on post-selection to eliminate the weak trace in the transmission channel. We show that the post-selection in…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2019-06-19 David R. M. Arvidsson-Shukur , Crispin H. W. Barnes

With recent progress on experimental quantum information processing, an important question has arisen as to whether it is possible to verify arbitrary computation performed on a quantum processor. A number of protocols have been proposed to…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-06-27 Joseph F. Fitzsimons , Michal Hajdušek

Counterfactuals have been recognized as an effective approach to explain classifier decisions. Nevertheless, they have not yet been considered in the context of clustering. In this work, we propose the use of counterfactuals to explain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-20 Georgios Vardakas , Antonia Karra , Evaggelia Pitoura , Aristidis Likas

We consider identification and inference about a counterfactual outcome mean when there is unmeasured confounding using tools from proximal causal inference (Miao et al. [2018], Tchetgen Tchetgen et al. [2020]). Proximal causal inference…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-03 Jeffrey Zhang , Wei Li , Wang Miao , Eric Tchetgen Tchetgen

Providing clear explanations to the choices of machine learning models is essential for these models to be deployed in crucial applications. Counterfactual and semi-factual explanations have emerged as two mechanisms for providing users…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 André Artelt , Martin Olsen , Kevin Tierney

Counterfactuals operationalised through algorithmic recourse have become a powerful tool to make artificial intelligence systems explainable. Conceptually, given an individual classified as y -- the factual -- we seek actions such that…

We propose partial measurements as a conceptual tool to understand how to operate with counterfactual claims in quantum physics. Indeed, unlike standard von Neumann measurements, partial measurements can be reversed probabilistically. We…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2011-05-30 G. S. Paraoanu