Explainability Requirements as Hyperproperties

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Finkbeiner, Bernd, Siber, Julian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Finkbeiner, Bernd
Siber, Julian
author_facet Finkbeiner, Bernd
Siber, Julian
contents Explainability is emerging as a key requirement for autonomous systems. While many works have focused on what constitutes a valid explanation, few have considered formalizing explainability as a system property. In this work, we approach this problem from the perspective of hyperproperties. We start with a combination of three prominent flavors of modal logic and show how they can be used for specifying and verifying counterfactual explainability in multi-agent systems: With Lewis' counterfactuals, linear-time temporal logic, and a knowledge modality, we can reason about whether agents know why a specific observation occurs, i.e., whether that observation is explainable to them. We use this logic to formalize multiple notions of explainability on the system level. We then show how this logic can be embedded into a hyperlogic. Notably, from this analysis we conclude that the model-checking problem of our logic is decidable, which paves the way for the automated verification of explainability requirements.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_16402
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Explainability Requirements as Hyperproperties
Finkbeiner, Bernd
Siber, Julian
Logic in Computer Science
Explainability is emerging as a key requirement for autonomous systems. While many works have focused on what constitutes a valid explanation, few have considered formalizing explainability as a system property. In this work, we approach this problem from the perspective of hyperproperties. We start with a combination of three prominent flavors of modal logic and show how they can be used for specifying and verifying counterfactual explainability in multi-agent systems: With Lewis' counterfactuals, linear-time temporal logic, and a knowledge modality, we can reason about whether agents know why a specific observation occurs, i.e., whether that observation is explainable to them. We use this logic to formalize multiple notions of explainability on the system level. We then show how this logic can be embedded into a hyperlogic. Notably, from this analysis we conclude that the model-checking problem of our logic is decidable, which paves the way for the automated verification of explainability requirements.
title Explainability Requirements as Hyperproperties
topic Logic in Computer Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.16402