Papers for

system test engineers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Unified explanations clarify cause and effect in reactive systems

Sufficient Reasons and Explanations for Reactive Systems

Abstract: We address the problem of temporal causality and explainability for reactive systems, and, in this setting, study sufficient reasons and contrastive explanations. These two notions are well-known explainability measures in the context of neural networks. In this work, we unify these notions for reactive systems and formal specifications given in temporal logic, providing dedicated definitions for sufficient reasons and contrastive explanations. We then lift these definitions to \emph{temporal} sufficient reasons and contrastive explanations, providing more general and symbolic representations of explainability. We analyze the complexity of both verifying and finding explanations of the different types, and we demonstrate our approach using a prototype implementation.

Thu 1 OctFormal Languages and Automata Theory

The gist

Understanding why a system does something over time can be tricky. This paper looks at how to explain the behavior of systems that react continuously to inputs, like software controlling machines. The authors combine two ways of explaining decisions, called sufficient reasons and contrastive explanations, and make them work for systems described using time-based rules. They also analyze how hard it is to find and check these explanations and show some examples using their own tool.

Open → 2610.02184v1