arXiv:2606.08696cs.LGcs.AI2026-06

在有限调用次数下,用智能体搜索生成更多有效改进建议。

Agentic Search for Counterfactual Recourse under Fixed LLM Budgets

论文配图:Agentic Search for Counterfactual Recourse under Fixed LLM Budgets
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用树搜索动态分配调用预算,优先探索新干预方向。
  • 在4个真实数据集上,独特有效建议数量显著高于单次生成方法。
  • 无需训练,仅依赖真实反馈,适合注重公平性和可解释性的场景。

反事实归因旨在提供可操作的特征变更建议,以改变预测模型做出的不利决策。现实中,个体往往需要多个可行替代方案,而非单一最优解释。利用大语言模型(LLMs)提示生成这些方案是一种自然方式,但提示调用次数常是主要计算与经济成本。因此,如何在固定调用预算下高效生成一组经验证的反事实建议,成为关键挑战。本文将此问题建模为固定预算下的搜索任务,提出Comp-MCTS框架:通过LLM生成提议、真实反馈验证、压缩引导剪枝,在无需训练、仅依赖真实反馈的条件下,最大化独特且经验证的反事实建议产出量。在四个真实表格数据集上的实验表明,Comp-MCTS在独特有效建议数量上显著优于单候选的LATS类基线,并在三个数据集上以相似或更低的验证成本达到相当或更高的产出,同时保持良好的接近性、稀疏性和新颖性表现。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Counterfactual recourse aims to provide actionable feature changes that would alter an unfavorable decision made by a predictive model. In practice, affected individuals often benefit from multiple feasible alternatives rather than a single optimal explanation. A natural way to produce such alternatives is to prompt large language models (LLMs). However, prompting incurs a practical constraint: the number of LLM calls is often the dominant computational and economic cost. Together, the need for multiple alternatives and this cost constraint shift the problem from finding a single high-quality counterfactual to efficiently generating a set of oracle-validated counterfactuals under a fixed LLM-call budget. In this work, we study counterfactual recourse generation in the LLM-agentic setting as a fixed-budget search problem and propose Comp-MCTS, an agentic tree-search framework that maximizes the yield of unique, oracle-validated counterfactuals under this budget while maintaining favorable quantity--quality trade-offs. Comp-MCTS allocates the budget toward novel intervention directions via LLM-based proposal generation, oracle validation, and compression-guided pruning, in a training-free, oracle-only setting. Experiments on four real-world tabular datasets show that Comp-MCTS substantially outperforms single-candidate LATS-style baselines in the yield of unique, oracle-validated counterfactuals, and offers favorable quantity--quality--efficiency trade-offs against stronger multi-candidate variants: comparable or higher yield at similar or lower oracle-evaluation cost on three of four datasets, plus competitive proximity, sparsity, and novelty.

反事实推理智能体搜索可解释性

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