Causal, Strategic, and Combined Responsibility Attribution in Situation Calculus Concurrent Game Structures

Responsibility is a central concept in accountable decision making for multiagent systems. As modern AI systems grow in complexity and autonomy, there is a growing demand for them to address issues in AI ethics, prompting researchers to formalize responsibility from diverse perspectives, including strategic responsibility. However, causal responsibility, i.e. responsibility due to actual causal contribution, has received much less attention. In this paper, we study variants of responsibility attribution from both strategic and causal perspectives within a synchronous game-theoretic logic framework that allows concurrent moves by multiple agents. Our formalization is based on Situation Calculus Synchronous Game Structures (SCSGS). We show that by combining these perspectives, one can obtain novel forms of responsibility attribution that are grounded on actual causation. While doing this, we propose an account of actual causation in SCSGS. We prove that our formalization handles the issues associated with preemption and over-determination well. We also study some key properties of responsibility and demonstrate that causal, strategic, and combined notions of responsibility are extensionally distinct.