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Related papers: Rational Counterfactuals

200 papers

When users receive either a positive or negative outcome from an automated system, Explainable AI (XAI) has almost exclusively focused on how to mutate negative outcomes into positive ones by crossing a decision boundary using…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Eoin M. Kenny , Weipeng Huang

Explaining autonomous and intelligent systems is critical in order to improve trust in their decisions. Counterfactuals have emerged as one of the most compelling forms of explanation. They address ``why not'' questions by revealing how…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Leila Amgoud , Martin Cooper

Counterfactual explanations emerge as a powerful approach in explainable AI, providing what-if scenarios that reveal how minimal changes to an input time series can alter the model's prediction. This work presents a survey of recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Udo Schlegel , Thomas Seidl

I argue that John Norton's notions of empirical, hypothetical, and counterfactual possibility can be successfully used to analyze counterintuitive examples of physical possibility and align better with modal intuitions of practicing…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2025-03-07 Balazs Gyenis

Post-hoc explanations of machine learning models are crucial for people to understand and act on algorithmic predictions. An intriguing class of explanations is through counterfactuals, hypothetical examples that show people how to obtain a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-09 Ramaravind Kommiya Mothilal , Amit Sharma , Chenhao Tan

In this paper we look at popular fairness methods that use causal counterfactuals. These methods capture the intuitive notion that a prediction is fair if it coincides with the prediction that would have been made if someone's race, gender…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-12 Jake Fawkes , Robin Evans , Dino Sejdinovic

The increasing use of machine learning in practice and legal regulations like EU's GDPR cause the necessity to be able to explain the prediction and behavior of machine learning models. A prominent example of particularly intuitive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-28 André Artelt , Barbara Hammer

When evaluating a counterfactual statement, it is often convenient to specify conditions that ought to be kept unchanged. Formally, this can be done by associating to each counterfactual a ceteris paribus set of formulas, specifying the…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Avgerinos Delkos , Marianna Girlando

In this paper we study the problem of making predictions using multiple structural casual models defined by different agents, under the constraint that the prediction satisfies the criterion of counterfactual fairness. Relying on the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Fabio Massimo Zennaro , Magdalena Ivanovska

Counterfactual explanations represent the minimal change to a data sample that alters its predicted classification, typically from an unfavorable initial class to a desired target class. Counterfactuals help answer questions such as "what…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-03 Brian Barr , Matthew R. Harrington , Samuel Sharpe , C. Bayan Bruss

This paper introduces a simple framework of counterfactual estimation for causal inference with time-series cross-sectional data, in which we estimate the average treatment effect on the treated by directly imputing counterfactual outcomes…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-08-16 Licheng Liu , Ye Wang , Yiqing Xu

LLM-based social simulations can generate believable community interactions, enabling ``policy wind tunnels'' where governance interventions are tested before deployment. But believability is not causality. Claims like ``intervention $A$…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Agam Goyal , Yian Wang , Eshwar Chandrasekharan , Hari Sundaram

Counterfactual analysis is intuitively performed by humans on a daily basis eg. "What should I have done differently to get the loan approved?". Such counterfactual questions also steer the formulation of scientific hypotheses. More…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-18 Juliane Weilbach , Sebastian Gerwinn , Melih Kandemir , Martin Fraenzle

The adoption of increasingly complex deep models has fueled an urgent need for insight into how these models make predictions. Counterfactual explanations form a powerful tool for providing actionable explanations to practitioners.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Paraskevas Pegios , Aasa Feragen , Andreas Abildtrup Hansen , Georgios Arvanitidis

Counterfactual reasoning has emerged as a crucial technique for generalizing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). By generating and analyzing counterfactual scenarios, researchers can assess the adaptability and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Shuai Yang , Qi Yang , Luoxi Tang , Yuqiao Meng , Nancy Guo , Jeremy Blackburn , Zhaohan Xi

In causal inference, the joint law of a set of counterfactual random variables is generally not identified. We show that a conservative version of the joint law - corresponding to the smallest treatment effect - is identified. Finding this…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-20 Sivaraman Balakrishnan , Edward Kennedy , Larry Wasserman

The use of counterfactuals for considerations of algorithmic fairness and explainability is gaining prominence within the machine learning community and industry. This paper argues for more caution with the use of counterfactuals when the…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2021-02-11 Atoosa Kasirzadeh , Andrew Smart

Knowing the truth is rarely enough -- we also seek out reasons why the fact is true. While much is known about how we explain contingent truths, we understand less about how we explain facts, such as those in mathematics, that are true as a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Gülce Kardeş , Simon DeDeo

Interpretable time series prediction is crucial for safety-critical areas such as healthcare and autonomous driving. Most existing methods focus on interpreting predictions by assigning important scores to segments of time series. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-23 Jingquan Yan , Hao Wang

Counterfactual explanations have been argued to be one of the most intuitive forms of explanation. They are typically defined as a minimal set of edits on a given data sample that, when applied, changes the output of a model on that sample.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Edmund Dervakos , Konstantinos Thomas , Giorgos Filandrianos , Giorgos Stamou