# Towards Explainable Inference about Object Motion using Qualitative Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.10935 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10935/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jul 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Movement Analytics: Current Status, Application to Manufacturing, and Future Prospects from an AI Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01344/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The capability of making explainable inferences regarding physical processes has long been desired. One fundamental physical process is object motion. Inferring what causes the motion of a group of objects can even be a challenging task for experts, e.g., in forensics science. Most of the work in the literature relies on physics simulation to draw such infer- ences. The simulation requires a precise model of the under- lying domain to work well and is essentially a black-box from which one can hardly obtain any useful explanation. By contrast, qualitative reasoning methods have the advan- tage in making transparent inferences with ambiguous infor- mation, which makes it suitable for this task. However, there has been no suitable qualitative theory proposed for object motion in three-dimensional space. In this paper, we take this challenge and develop a qualitative theory for the motion of rigid objects. Based on this theory, we develop a reasoning method to solve a very interesting problem: Assuming there are several objects that were initially at rest and now have started to move. We want to infer what action causes the movement of these objects.