Binary Spiking Neural Networks as Causal Models

Aditya Kar; Emiliano Lorini; Timothée Masquelier

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arXiv · 2604.27007

Binary Spiking Neural Networks as Causal Models

Aditya Kar·Emiliano Lorini·Timothée Masquelier

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Abstract

We provide a causal analysis of Binary Spiking Neural Networks (BSNNs) to explain their behavior. We formally define a BSNN and represent its spiking activity as a binary causal model. Thanks to this causal representation, we are able to explain the output of the network by leveraging logic-based methods. In particular, we show that we can successfully use a SAT as well as a SMT solver to compute abductive explanations from this binary causal model. To illustrate our approach, we trained the BSNN on the standard MNIST dataset and applied our SAT-based and SMT-based methods to finding abductive explanations of the network's classifications based on pixel-level features. We also compared the found explanations against SHAP, a popular method used in the area of explainable AI. We show that, unlike SHAP, our approach guarantees that a found explanation does not contain completely irrelevant features.

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Aditya Kar, Emiliano Lorini, Timothée Masquelier. 2026-04-29. Binary Spiking Neural Networks as Causal Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.27007

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