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arXiv · 2507.08454

Why this and not that? A Logic-based Framework for Contrastive Explanations

Tobias Geibinger·Reijo Jaakkola·Antti Kuusisto·Xinghan Liu·Miikka Vilander
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Abstract

We define several canonical problems related to contrastive explanations, each answering a question of the form ''Why P but not Q?''. The problems compute causes for both P and Q, explicitly comparing their differences. We investigate the basic properties of our definitions in the setting of propositional logic. We show, inter alia, that our framework captures a cardinality-minimal version of existing contrastive explanations in the literature. Furthermore, we provide an extensive analysis of the computational complexities of the problems. We also implement the problems for CNF-formulas using answer set programming and present several examples demonstrating how they work in practice.

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Tobias Geibinger, Reijo Jaakkola, Antti Kuusisto, Xinghan Liu, Miikka Vilander. 2025-07-11. Why this and not that? A Logic-based Framework for Contrastive Explanations. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08454

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