Sufficient Reasons and Explanations for Reactive Systems

Abstract

We address the problem of temporal causality and explainability for reactive systems, and, in this setting, study sufficient reasons and contrastive explanations. These two notions are well-known explainability measures in the context of neural networks. In this work, we unify these notions for reactive systems and formal specifications given in temporal logic, providing dedicated definitions for sufficient reasons and contrastive explanations. We then lift these definitions to \emph{temporal} sufficient reasons and contrastive explanations, providing more general and symbolic representations of explainability. We analyze the complexity of both verifying and finding explanations of the different types, and we demonstrate our approach using a prototype implementation.