Teleological Inference in Structural Causal Models via Intentional Interventions
Structural causal models (SCMs) were conceived to formulate and answer causal questions. This paper shows that SCMs can also be used to formulate and answer teleological questions, concerning the intentions of a state-aware, goal-directed agent intervening in a causal system. We review limitations of previous approaches to modeling such agents, and then introduce intentional interventions, a new time-agnostic operator that induces a twin SCM we call a structural final model (SFM). SFMs treat observed values as the outcome of intentional interventions and relate them to the counterfactual conditions of those interventions (what would have happened had the agent not intervened). We show how...
| Authors | Dario Compagno, Fabio Massimo Zennaro |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 19 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 March 2026 |
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