A Non-Interventionist Approach to Causal Reasoning Based on Lewisian Counterfactuals

Aguilera-Ventura, Carlos; Liu, Xinghan; Lorini, Emiliano; Rozplokhas, Dmitry

doi:10.24963/ijcai.2025/479

A Non-Interventionist Approach to Causal Reasoning Based on Lewisian Counterfactuals

Carlos Aguilera-Ventura, Xinghan Liu, Emiliano Lorini, Dmitry Rozplokhas

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Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Main Track. Pages 4301-4310.

https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/479

Keywords

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: KRR: Causality
Uncertainty in AI: UAI: Causality, structural causal models and causal inference

Abstract

We present a computationally grounded semantics for counterfactual conditionals in which i) the state in a model is decomposed into two elements: a propositional valuation and a causal base in propositional form that represents the causal information available at the state; and ii) the comparative similarity relation between states is computed from the states' two components. We show that, by means of our semantics, we can elegantly formalize the notion of actual cause without recurring to the primitive notion of intervention. Furthermore, we provide a succinct formulation of the model checking problem for a language of counterfactual conditionals in our semantics. We show that this problem is PSPACE-complete and provide a reduction of it into QBF that can be used for automatic verification of causal properties.

Carlos Aguilera-Ventura, Xinghan Liu, Emiliano Lorini, and Dmitry Rozplokhas. 2025. A Non-Interventionist Approach to Causal Reasoning Based on Lewisian Counterfactuals. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-25. IJCAI, 4301–4310. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/479

@inproceedings{ijcai2025p479,
  title     = {A Non-Interventionist Approach to Causal Reasoning Based on Lewisian Counterfactuals},
  author    = {Aguilera-Ventura, Carlos and Liu, Xinghan and Lorini, Emiliano and Rozplokhas, Dmitry},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on
               Artificial Intelligence, {IJCAI-25}},
  publisher = {International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization},
  editor    = {James Kwok},
  pages     = {4301--4310},
  year      = {2025},
  month     = {8},
  note      = {Main Track},
  doi       = {10.24963/ijcai.2025/479},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/479},
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - A Non-Interventionist Approach to Causal Reasoning Based on Lewisian Counterfactuals
AU  - Aguilera-Ventura, Carlos
AU  - Liu, Xinghan
AU  - Lorini, Emiliano
AU  - Rozplokhas, Dmitry
T2  - Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-25
PB  - International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization
PY  - 2025
SP  - 4301
EP  - 4310
DO  - 10.24963/ijcai.2025/479
UR  - https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/479
ER  -