Efficient Discovery of Actual Causality with Uncertainty

Abstract: Identifying the actual cause of events in engineered systems is a fundamental challenge in system analysis. Finding such causes becomes more challenging in the presence of noise and uncertainty in real-world systems. In this paper, we adopt the notion of probabilistic actual causality by Fenton-Glynn, which is a probabilistic extension of Halpern and Pearl's actual causality, and propose a novel method to formally reason about causal effect of events in systems subject to uncertainty. We (1) formulate the discovery of probabilistic actual causes in computing systems as an SMT problem, and (2) address the scalability challenges by introducing an abstraction-refinement technique that significantly improves efficiency. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through three case studies, identifying probabilistic causes of safety violations in (1) the Mountain Car problem, (2) the Lunar Lander benchmark, and (3) MPC controller for an F-16 autopilot simulator.