论文标题
从检查到推理:实际因果计算作为优化问题
From Checking to Inference: Actual Causality Computations as Optimization Problems
论文作者
论文摘要
实际因果关系越来越充分理解。 Halpern和Pearl提出的最新正式方法使这个概念成熟到足以适应自动推理。实际因果关系对于建立负责任的可解释系统尤其重要。除其他原因外,由于反事实的要求和原因的最低限度,因果关系在计算上很难。先前的方法提出了针对自动因果关系推理的问题的效率低下或限制和特定领域的解决方案。在本文中,我们提出了一种新的方法,可以基于反事实计算中的可量化概念来制定因果推理的不同概念,作为优化问题。我们贡献并比较了两个紧凑,非平地和声音整数线性编程(ILP)和最大满意度(MAXSAT)编码以检查因果关系。给定候选原因,两种方法都确定了最小原因。另外,我们提出了一个ILP编码以推断因果关系而无需候选原因。我们表明,这两个概念都是有效自动化的。使用具有超过$ 8000 $变量的型号,在几秒钟内计算检查,在许多情况下,MaxSat优于ILP。相比之下,推论是在几分钟内计算的。
Actual causality is increasingly well understood. Recent formal approaches, proposed by Halpern and Pearl, have made this concept mature enough to be amenable to automated reasoning. Actual causality is especially vital for building accountable, explainable systems. Among other reasons, causality reasoning is computationally hard due to the requirements of counterfactuality and the minimality of causes. Previous approaches presented either inefficient or restricted, and domain-specific, solutions to the problem of automating causality reasoning. In this paper, we present a novel approach to formulate different notions of causal reasoning, over binary acyclic models, as optimization problems, based on quantifiable notions within counterfactual computations. We contribute and compare two compact, non-trivial, and sound integer linear programming (ILP) and Maximum Satisfiability (MaxSAT) encodings to check causality. Given a candidate cause, both approaches identify what a minimal cause is. Also, we present an ILP encoding to infer causality without requiring a candidate cause. We show that both notions are efficiently automated. Using models with more than $8000$ variables, checking is computed in a matter of seconds, with MaxSAT outperforming ILP in many cases. In contrast, inference is computed in a matter of minutes.