From Actions to Programs as Abstract Actual Causes

Bita Banihashemi, Shakil M Khan, Mikhail Soutchanski

[AAAI-22] Main Track
Abstract: Causality plays a central role in reasoning about observations. In many cases, it might be useful to define the conditions under which a non-deterministic program can be called an actual cause of an effect in a setting where a sequence of pro- grams are executed one after another. There can be two perspectives, one where at least one execution of the program leads to the effect, and another where all executions do so. The former captures a ``weak'' notion of causation and is more general than the latter stronger notion. In this paper, we give the definition of weak potential causes. Our analysis is performed within the situation calculus basic action theories and we consider programs formulated in the logic programming language ConGolog. Within this setting, we show how one can utilize a recently developed abstraction framework to relate causes at various levels of abstraction. In particular, we prove that under some conditions, causes defined at an abstract and a concrete level can be related with each other in a kind of commutative diagram.

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    Fri, February 25 5:00 PM - 6:45 PM (+00:00)
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    Sun, February 27 12:45 AM - 2:30 AM (+00:00)
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