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Machine learning models are widely used in real-world applications. However, their complexity makes it often challenging to interpret the rationale behind their decisions. Counterfactual explanations (CEs) have emerged as a viable solution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-04 Muhammad Suffian , Jose M. Alonso-Moral , Alessandro Bogliolo

Counterfactuals are widely used in AI to explain how minimal changes to a model's input can lead to a different output. However, established methods for computing counterfactuals typically focus on one-step decision-making, and are not…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Paul Kobialka , Lina Gerlach , Francesco Leofante , Erika Ábrahám , Silvia Lizeth Tapia Tarifa , Einar Broch Johnsen

We propose a formal model for counterfactual estimation with unobserved confounding in "data-rich" settings, i.e., where there are a large number of units and a large number of measurements per unit. Our model provides a bridge between the…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-04-03 Alberto Abadie , Anish Agarwal , Devavrat Shah

In the field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), counterfactual examples explain to a user the predictions of a trained decision model by indicating the modifications to be made to the instance so as to change its associated…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Thibault Laugel , Adulam Jeyasothy , Marie-Jeanne Lesot , Christophe Marsala , Marcin Detyniecki

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

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

Present language understanding methods have demonstrated extraordinary ability of recognizing patterns in texts via machine learning. However, existing methods indiscriminately use the recognized patterns in the testing phase that is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Fuli Feng , Jizhi Zhang , Xiangnan He , Hanwang Zhang , Tat-Seng Chua

Many of the traditional recommendation algorithms are designed based on the fundamental idea of mining or learning correlative patterns from data to estimate the user-item correlative preference. However, pure correlative learning may lead…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Shuyuan Xu , Yingqiang Ge , Yunqi Li , Zuohui Fu , Xu Chen , Yongfeng Zhang

Explainability is increasingly seen as an essential feature of rule-based smart environments. While counterfactual explanations, which describe what could have been done differently to achieve a desired outcome, are a powerful tool in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Anna Trapp , Mersedeh Sadeghi , Andreas Vogelsang

Counterfactual explanations are widely used to communicate how inputs must change for a model to alter its prediction. For a single instance, many valid counterfactuals can exist, which leaves open the possibility for an explanation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-09 James Hinns , Sofie Goethals , Stephan Van der Veeken , Theodoros Evgeniou , David Martens

Counterfactuals -- expressing what might have been true under different circumstances -- have been widely applied in statistics and machine learning to help understand causal relationships. More recently, counterfactuals have begun to…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2024-04-08 Arran Zeyu Wang , David Borland , David Gotz

We investigate the limitations of random trials when the cause of interest is confounded with the effect by formalizing a counterfactual policy-space where the agent's natural predilection is input to a soft-intervention.

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Erik Skalnes

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has recently gained a swell of interest, as many Artificial Intelligence (AI) practitioners and developers are compelled to rationalize how such AI-based systems work. Decades back, most XAI systems…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Muhammad Suffian , Muhammad Yaseen Khan , Alessandro Bogliolo

There has been a growing interest in model-agnostic methods that can make deep learning models more transparent and explainable to a user. Some researchers recently argued that for a machine to achieve a certain degree of human-level…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Yu-Liang Chou , Catarina Moreira , Peter Bruza , Chun Ouyang , Joaquim Jorge

Counterfactual Explanations (CE) face several unresolved challenges, such as ensuring stability, synthesizing multiple CEs, and providing plausibility and sparsity guarantees. From a more practical point of view, recent studies [Pawelczyk…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-19 Salim I. Amoukou , Nicolas J. B Brunel

Recently, a groundswell of research has identified the use of counterfactual explanations as a potentially significant solution to the Explainable AI (XAI) problem. It is argued that (a) technically, these counterfactual cases can be…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-05-29 Mark T. Keane , Barry Smyth

Counterfactual inference is a useful tool for comparing outcomes of interventions on complex systems. It requires us to represent the system in form of a structural causal model, complete with a causal diagram, probabilistic assumptions on…

An analysis using classical stochastic processes is used to construct a consistent system of quantum counterfactual reasoning. When applied to a counterfactual version of Hardy's paradox, it shows that the probabilistic character of quantum…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2009-10-31 Robert B. Griffiths

As machine learning (ML) algorithms are used in applications that involve humans, concerns have arisen that these algorithms may be biased against certain social groups. \textit{Counterfactual fairness} (CF) is a fairness notion proposed in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Zhiqun Zuo , Tian Xie , Xuwei Tan , Xueru Zhang , Mohammad Mahdi Khalili

In observational studies, treatment may be adapted to covariates at several times without a fixed protocol, in continuous time. Treatment influences covariates, which influence treatment, which influences covariates, and so on. Then even…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-09-02 Judith J. Lok