{"ID":2895645,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08454","arxiv_id":"2507.08454","title":"Why this and not that? A Logic-based Framework for Contrastive Explanations","abstract":"We define several canonical problems related to contrastive explanations, each answering a question of the form ''Why P but not Q?''. The problems compute causes for both P and Q, explicitly comparing their differences. We investigate the basic properties of our definitions in the setting of propositional logic. We show, inter alia, that our framework captures a cardinality-minimal version of existing contrastive explanations in the literature. Furthermore, we provide an extensive analysis of the computational complexities of the problems. We also implement the problems for CNF-formulas using answer set programming and present several examples demonstrating how they work in practice.","short_abstract":"We define several canonical problems related to contrastive explanations, each answering a question of the form ''Why P but not Q?''. The problems compute causes for both P and Q, explicitly comparing their differences. We investigate the basic properties of our definitions in the setting of propositional logic. We sho...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08454","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.08454v1","authors":"[\"Tobias Geibinger\",\"Reijo Jaakkola\",\"Antti Kuusisto\",\"Xinghan Liu\",\"Miikka Vilander\"]","published":"2025-07-11T09:55:04Z","proceeding":"cs.AI","tasks":"[\"cs.AI\",\"cs.LG\",\"cs.LO\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}