On the Semantics of Primary Cause in Hybrid Dynamic Domains

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.14994v1
• Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2026 18:25:08 GMT
• Title: On the Semantics of Primary Cause in Hybrid Dynamic Domains
• Authors: Shakil M. Khan, Asim Mehmood, Sandra Zilles,
• Abstract summary: We propose two definitions of primary cause in a hybrid action-theoretic framework.<n>One is foundational in nature while the other formalizes causation through contributions.<n>We show that our definitions of causation have some intuitively justifiable properties.
• Score: 4.442502152743988
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Reasoning about actual causes of observed effects is fundamental to the study of rationality. This important problem has been studied since the time of Aristotle, with formal mathematical accounts emerging recently. We live in a world where change due to actions can be both discrete and continuous, that is, hybrid. Yet, despite extensive research on actual causation, only few recent studies looked into causation with continuous change. Building on recent progress, in this paper we propose two definitions of primary cause in a hybrid action-theoretic framework, namely the hybrid temporal situation calculus. One of these is foundational in nature while the other formalizes causation through contributions, which can then be verified from a counterfactual perspective using a modified ``but-for'' test. We prove that these two definitions are indeed equivalent. We then show that our definitions of causation have some intuitively justifiable properties.

Related papers

• A fine-grained look at causal effects in causal spaces [10.99954450966829]
  We study causal effects at the level of events, drawing inspiration from probability theory.<n>We introduce several binary definitions that determine whether a causal effect is present.<n>We show that we can recover the common measures of treatment effect as special cases.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-12-11T14:41:18Z)
• Reasoning about Actual Causes in Nondeterministic Domains -- Extended Version [2.580765958706854]
  We build on preliminary work on actual causation in the nondeterministic situation calculus.<n>We show how regression in the situation calculus can be extended to reason about such notions of actual causes.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-12-21T18:35:25Z)
• Identifiable Latent Polynomial Causal Models Through the Lens of Change [82.14087963690561]
  Causal representation learning aims to unveil latent high-level causal representations from observed low-level data.<n>One of its primary tasks is to provide reliable assurance of identifying these latent causal models, known as identifiability.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-10-24T07:46:10Z)
• Nonparametric Identifiability of Causal Representations from Unknown Interventions [63.1354734978244]
  We study causal representation learning, the task of inferring latent causal variables and their causal relations from mixtures of the variables. Our goal is to identify both the ground truth latents and their causal graph up to a set of ambiguities which we show to be irresolvable from interventional data.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-06-01T10:51:58Z)
• Axiomatization of Interventional Probability Distributions [4.02487511510606]
  Causal intervention is axiomatized under the rules of do-calculus. We show that under our axiomatizations, the intervened distributions are Markovian to the defined intervened causal graphs. We also show that a large class of natural structural causal models satisfy the theory presented here.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-05-08T06:07:42Z)
• Phenomenological Causality [14.817342045377842]
  We propose a notion of 'phenomenological causality' whose basic concept is a set of elementary actions. We argue that it is consistent with the causal Markov condition when the system under consideration interacts with other variables that control the elementary actions.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-11-15T13:05:45Z)
• Identifying Weight-Variant Latent Causal Models [82.14087963690561]
  We find that transitivity acts as a key role in impeding the identifiability of latent causal representations. Under some mild assumptions, we can show that the latent causal representations can be identified up to trivial permutation and scaling. We propose a novel method, termed Structural caUsAl Variational autoEncoder, which directly learns latent causal representations and causal relationships among them.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-08-30T11:12:59Z)
• Active Bayesian Causal Inference [72.70593653185078]
  We propose Active Bayesian Causal Inference (ABCI), a fully-Bayesian active learning framework for integrated causal discovery and reasoning. ABCI jointly infers a posterior over causal models and queries of interest. We show that our approach is more data-efficient than several baselines that only focus on learning the full causal graph.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-06-04T22:38:57Z)
• Typing assumptions improve identification in causal discovery [123.06886784834471]
  Causal discovery from observational data is a challenging task to which an exact solution cannot always be identified. We propose a new set of assumptions that constrain possible causal relationships based on the nature of the variables.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-07-22T14:23:08Z)
• The Counterfactual NESS Definition of Causation [3.198144010381572]
  I show that our definition is in fact a formalization of Wright's famous NESS definition of causation combined with a counterfactual difference-making condition. I modify our definition to offer a substantial improvement: I weaken the difference-making condition in such a way that it avoids the problematic analysis of cases of preemption.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-12-09T15:57:56Z)
• On the complex behaviour of the density in composite quantum systems [62.997667081978825]
  We study how the probability of presence of a particle is distributed between the two parts of a composite fermionic system. We prove that it is a non-perturbative property and we find out a large/small coupling constant duality. Inspired by the proof of KAM theorem, we are able to deal with this problem by introducing a cut-off in energies that eliminates these small denominators.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-04-14T21:41:15Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.