Beyond But-for Test: Counterfactual Explanation in Abstract Argumentation via Actual Causality (Extended Version)

Siyi Liu; Muyun Shao; Beishui Liao

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arXiv · 2606.31080

Beyond But-for Test: Counterfactual Explanation in Abstract Argumentation via Actual Causality (Extended Version)

Siyi Liu·Muyun Shao·Beishui Liao

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Abstract

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 counterfactual condition introduced in the Halpern-Pearl definition, our method goes beyond the but-for test, thereby correctly identifying causes in argumentation structures such as Preemption and Overdetermination. Through comparison, we show that our method surpasses prior methods in both expressiveness and reliability.

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Siyi Liu, Muyun Shao, Beishui Liao. 2026-06-30. Beyond But-for Test: Counterfactual Explanation in Abstract Argumentation via Actual Causality (Extended Version). https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31080

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