Beyond But-for Test: Counterfactual Explanation in Abstract Argumentation via Actual Causality (Extended Version)
Counterfactual explanation in abstract argumentation calls for an answer to the what-if query: would the topic argument still be accepted if the status of certain other arguments were changed? Existing approaches are limited to the but-for test and fail to accommodate more refined counterfactual conditions. To overcome these limitations, we introduce an intervention-based counterfactual reasoning framework in abstract argumentation. Our approach encodes the acceptance conditions of arguments as equations, then defines an intervention operator that supports (1) changing sets of arguments simultaneously, and (2) fixing witness arguments to their actual labels. Guided by the refined counterf...
| Authors | Siyi Liu, Muyun Shao, Beishui Liao |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LO |
| Published | 30 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 June 2026 |
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