Introduces 'intentional interventions' and Structural Final Models (SFMs) to detect and infer agent goals within causal frameworks.
March 20, 2026
Original Paper
Teleological Inference in Structural Causal Models via Intentional Interventions
arXiv · 2603.18968
The Takeaway
Traditional causal models (SCMs) struggle to distinguish between accidental events and goal-directed actions. This framework allows researchers to empirically detect agents and discover their intentions by comparing observed outcomes against counterfactual conditions where an agent did not intervene.
From the abstract
Structural causal models (SCMs) were conceived to formulate and answer causal questions. This paper shows that SCMs can also be used to formulate and answer teleological questions, concerning the intentions of a state-aware, goal-directed agent intervening in a causal system. We review limitations of previous approaches to modeling such agents, and then introduce intentional interventions, a new time-agnostic operator that induces a twin SCM we call a structural final model (SFM). SFMs treat obs