RealAC生成真实可操作的反事实解释,无需领域知识且支持用户自定义约束。
RealAC: A Domain-Agnostic Framework for Realistic and Actionable Counterfactual Explanations
- 通过对齐事实与反事实样本的特征联合分布,自动保留复杂特征依赖关系。
- 在多个数据集上优于现有方法,在因果边分数和现实性指标上提升15%-23%。
- 支持用户冻结不可变属性,适合需要可执行解释的高可信场景。
反事实解释通过描述输入特征的最小变化来说明模型决策原因,从而提升可理解性。为在实际中真正有用,这些解释必须既符合数据分布又满足用户可行性约束。现有方法通常依赖人工设计的刚性约束或特定领域知识,难以泛化且无法捕捉数据中的非线性复杂关系。此外,它们很少支持用户偏好,常生成因果上不合理或不可执行的解释。我们提出 RealAC,一种无领域依赖的框架,可生成真实且可操作的反事实。该框架通过在事实与反事实实例间对齐特征对的联合分布,自动保留复杂的特征依赖关系,无需显式领域知识。同时允许用户通过冻结某些特征来表示无法或不愿更改的属性,优化过程中抑制其变化。在三个合成数据集和两个真实数据集上的评估表明,RealAC在现实性与可操作性之间取得良好平衡。相比前沿基线与基于大语言模型的生成方法,其在因果边得分、依赖保持得分及IM1现实性指标上均表现更优,为因果感知与用户中心的反事实生成提供有效解决方案。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Counterfactual explanations provide human-understandable reasoning for AI-made decisions by describing minimal changes to input features that would alter a model's prediction. To be truly useful in practice, such explanations must be realistic and feasible -- they should respect both the underlying data distribution and user-defined feasibility constraints. Existing approaches often enforce inter-feature dependencies through rigid, hand-crafted constraints or domain-specific knowledge, which limits their generalizability and ability to capture complex, nonlinear relations inherent in data. Moreover, they rarely accommodate user-specified preferences and suggest explanations that are causally implausible or infeasible to act upon. We introduce RealAC, a domain-agnostic framework for generating realistic and actionable counterfactuals. RealAC automatically preserves complex inter-feature dependencies without relying on explicit domain knowledge -- by aligning the joint distributions of feature pairs between factual and counterfactual instances. The framework also allows end-users to ``freeze'' attributes they cannot or do not wish to change by suppressing change in frozen features during optimization. Evaluations on three synthetic and two real datasets demonstrate that RealAC balances realism with actionability. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and Large Language Model-based counterfactual generation techniques in causal edge score, dependency preservation score, and IM1 realism metric and offers a solution for causality-aware and user-centric counterfactual generation.
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