Declarative Approaches to Counterfactual Explanations for Classification
Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez（阿道夫·伊瓦涅斯大学）
Leopoldo Bertossi
备注：
Camera-ready of journal version, with some final additions and revisions. Revised and considerably extended version of a RuleML-RR'20 paper [arXiv:2004.13237]. Submitted by invitation
We propose answer-set programs that specify and compute counterfactual interventions on entities that are input on a classification model. In relation to the outcome of the model, the resulting counterfactual entities serve as a basis for the definition and computation of causality-based explanation scores for the feature values in the entity under classification, namely "responsibility scores". The approach and the programs can be applied with black-box models, and also with models that can be specified as logic programs, such as rule-based classifiers. The main focus of this work is on the specification and computation of "best" counterfactual entities, i.e. those that lead to maximum responsibility scores. From them one can read off the explanations as maximum responsibility feature values in the original entity. We also extend the programs to bring into the picture semantic or domain knowledge. We show how the approach could be extended by means of probabilistic methods, and how the underlying probability distributions could be modified through the use of constraints. Several examples of programs written in the syntax of the DLV ASP-solver, and run with it, are shown.
Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez（阿道夫·伊瓦涅斯大学）；Millennium Inst. for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD)（千年数据基础研究研究所）
We describe some recent approaches to score-based explanations for query answers in databases and outcomes from classification models in machine learning. The focus is on work done by the author and collaborators. Special emphasis is placed on declarative approaches based on answer-set programming to the use of counterfactual reasoning for score specification and computation. Several examples that illustrate the flexibility of these methods are shown.
Tilburg University（蒂尔堡大学）；University of Würzburg（维尔茨堡大学）
The explication and the generation of explanations are prominent topics in artificial intelligence and data science, in order to make methods and systems more transparent and understandable for humans. This paper investigates the problem of link analysis, specifically link prediction and anomalous link discovery in social networks using the declarative method of Answer set programming (ASP). Applying ASP for link prediction provides a powerful declarative approach, e.g., for incorporating domain knowledge for explicative prediction. In this context, we propose a novel method for generating exp…
There are some recent approaches and results about the use of answer-set programming for specifying counterfactual interventions on entities under classification, and reasoning about them. These approaches are flexible and modular in that they allow the seamless addition of domain knowledge. Reasoning is enabled by query answering from the answer-set program. The programs can be used to specify and compute responsibility-based numerical scores as attributive explanations for classification results.
Transparency is an essential requirement of machine learning based decision making systems that are deployed in real world. Often, transparency of a given system is achieved by providing explanations of the behavior and predictions of the given system. Counterfactual explanations are a prominent instance of particular intuitive explanations of decision making systems. While a lot of different methods for computing counterfactual explanations exist, only very few work (apart from work from the causality domain) considers feature dependencies as well as plausibility which might limit the set of …
Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez（阿道夫·伊瓦涅斯大学）；Millennium Inst. for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD)（千禧基础数据研究研究所）
We describe how answer-set programs can be used to declaratively specify counterfactual interventions on entities under classification, and reason about them. In particular, they can be used to define and compute responsibility scores as attribution-based explanations for outcomes from classification models. The approach allows for the inclusion of domain knowledge and supports query answering. A detailed example with a naive-Bayes classifier is presented.
University of Tübingen（蒂宾根大学）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）
As machine learning (ML) models become more widely deployed in high-stakes applications, counterfactual explanations have emerged as key tools for providing actionable model explanations in practice. Despite the growing popularity of counterfactual explanations, a deeper understanding of these explanations is still lacking. In this work, we systematically analyze counterfactual explanations through the lens of adversarial examples. We do so by formalizing the similarities between popular counterfactual explanation and adversarial example generation methods identifying conditions when they are …
SKEMA Business School（SKEMA商学院）；Millennium Institute for Foundations of Data Research（千禧数据基础研究所）
In this expository article we highlight the relevance of explanations for artificial intelligence, in general, and for the newer developments in {\em explainable AI}, referring to origins and connections of and among different approaches. We describe in simple terms, explanations in data management and machine learning that are based on attribution-scores, and counterfactuals as found in the area of causality. We elaborate on the importance of logical reasoning when dealing with counterfactuals, and their use for score computation.
Transparency is a fundamental requirement for decision making systems when these should be deployed in the real world. It is usually achieved by providing explanations of the system's behavior. A prominent and intuitive type of explanations are counterfactual explanations. Counterfactual explanations explain a behavior to the user by proposing actions -- as changes to the input -- that would cause a different (specified) behavior of the system. However, such explanation methods can be unstable with respect to small changes to the input -- i.e. even a small change in the input can lead to huge …
Recent papers in explainable AI have made a compelling case for counterfactual modes of explanation. While counterfactual explanations appear to be extremely effective in some instances, they are formally equivalent to adversarial examples. This presents an apparent paradox for explainability researchers: if these two procedures are formally equivalent, what accounts for the explanatory divide apparent between counterfactual explanations and adversarial examples? We resolve this paradox by placing emphasis back on the semantics of counterfactual expressions. Producing satisfactory explanations…
Counterfactual explanations for machine learning models are used to find minimal interventions to the feature values such that the model changes the prediction to a different output or a target output. A valid counterfactual explanation should have likely feature values. Here, we address the challenge of generating counterfactual explanations that lie in the same data distribution as that of the training data and more importantly, they belong to the target class distribution. This requirement has been addressed through the incorporation of auto-encoder reconstruction loss in the counterfactual…
University College Dublin（都柏林大学）；Insight Centre for Data Analytics（洞察数据分析中心）；VistaMilk SFI Research Centre（VistaMilk科学基金会爱尔兰研究中心）
Counterfactual explanations have emerged as a popular solution for the eXplainable AI (XAI) problem of elucidating the predictions of black-box deep-learning systems due to their psychological validity, flexibility across problem domains and proposed legal compliance. While over 100 counterfactual methods exist, claiming to generate plausible explanations akin to those preferred by people, few have actually been tested on users ($\sim7\%$). So, the psychological validity of these counterfactual algorithms for effective XAI for image data is not established. This issue is addressed here using a…
In recent years, there has been an explosion of AI research on counterfactual explanations as a solution to the problem of eXplainable AI (XAI). These explanations seem to offer technical, psychological and legal benefits over other explanation techniques. We survey 100 distinct counterfactual explanation methods reported in the literature. This survey addresses the extent to which these methods have been adequately evaluated, both psychologically and computationally, and quantifies the shortfalls occurring. For instance, only 21% of these methods have been user tested. Five key deficits in th…
University College Dublin（都柏林大学学院）；Accenture Labs（埃森哲实验室）；Insight Centre for Data Analytics（洞察数据分析中心）；VistaMilk SFI Research Centre（VistaMilk SFI研究中心）
Counterfactual explanations are an increasingly popular form of post hoc explanation due to their (i) applicability across problem domains, (ii) proposed legal compliance (e.g., with GDPR), and (iii) reliance on the contrastive nature of human explanation. Although counterfactual explanations are normally used to explain individual predictive-instances, we explore a novel use case in which groups of similar instances are explained in a collective fashion using ``group counterfactuals'' (e.g., to highlight a repeating pattern of illness in a group of patients). These group counterfactuals meet …
Language-enabled AI systems can answer complex, multi-hop questions to high accuracy, but supporting answers with evidence is a more challenging task which is important for the transparency and trustworthiness to users. Prior work in this area typically makes a trade-off between efficiency and accuracy; state-of-the-art deep neural network systems are too cumbersome to be useful in large-scale applications, while the fastest systems lack reliability. In this work, we integrate fast syntactic methods with powerful semantic methods for multi-hop explanation generation based on declarative facts.…
The increasing deployment of machine learning as well as legal regulations such as EU's GDPR cause a need for user-friendly explanations of decisions proposed by machine learning models. Counterfactual explanations are considered as one of the most popular techniques to explain a specific decision of a model. While the computation of "arbitrary" counterfactual explanations is well studied, it is still an open research problem how to efficiently compute plausible and feasible counterfactual explanations. We build upon recent work and propose and study a formal definition of plausible counterfac…
Counterfactual explanations, which deal with "why not?" scenarios, can provide insightful explanations to an AI agent's behavior. In this work, we focus on generating counterfactual explanations for deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents which operate in visual input environments like Atari. We introduce counterfactual state explanations, a novel example-based approach to counterfactual explanations based on generative deep learning. Specifically, a counterfactual state illustrates what minimal change is needed to an Atari game image such that the agent chooses a different action. We also eva…
paluno - The Ruhr Institute for Software Technology（帕鲁诺——鲁尔软件技术研究所）
Predictive business process monitoring increasingly leverages sophisticated prediction models. Although sophisticated models achieve consistently higher prediction accuracy than simple models, one major drawback is their lack of interpretability, which limits their adoption in practice. We thus see growing interest in explainable predictive business process monitoring, which aims to increase the interpretability of prediction models. Existing solutions focus on giving factual explanations.While factual explanations can be helpful, humans typically do not ask why a particular prediction was mad…
Ikerlan Technology Research Centre（伊克尔兰技术研究中心）；Basque Research and Technology Alliance (BRTA)（巴斯克研究与技术联盟）；Mondragon University（蒙德拉贡大学）
Deep Learning has become a very valuable tool in different fields, and no one doubts the learning capacity of these models. Nevertheless, since Deep Learning models are often seen as black boxes due to their lack of interpretability, there is a general mistrust in their decision-making process. To find a balance between effectiveness and interpretability, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is gaining popularity in recent years, and some of the methods within this area are used to generate counterfactual explanations. The process of generating these explanations generally consists of sol…
Explanation of AI, as well as fairness of algorithms' decisions and the transparency of the decision model, are becoming more and more important. And it is crucial to design effective and human-friendly techniques when opening the black-box model. Counterfactual conforms to the human way of thinking and provides a human-friendly explanation, and its corresponding explanation algorithm refers to a strategic alternation of a given data point so that its model output is "counter-facted", i.e. the prediction is reverted. In this paper, we adapt counterfactual explanation over fine-grained image cl…
Insight SFI Centre for Data Analytics（Insight SFI数据分析中心）；VistaMilk SFI Research Centre（VistaMilk SFI研究中心）；University College Dublin（都柏林大学）
Counterfactual explanations provide a potentially significant solution to the Explainable AI (XAI) problem, but good, native counterfactuals have been shown to rarely occur in most datasets. Hence, the most popular methods generate synthetic counterfactuals using blind perturbation. However, such methods have several shortcomings: the resulting counterfactuals (i) may not be valid data-points (they often use features that do not naturally occur), (ii) may lack the sparsity of good counterfactuals (if they modify too many features), and (iii) may lack diversity (if the generated counterfactuals…
University of Tübingen（图宾根大学）；CarePay International（CarePay国际公司）
Counterfactual explanations provide means for prescriptive model explanations by suggesting actionable feature changes (e.g., increase income) that allow individuals to achieve favorable outcomes in the future (e.g., insurance approval). Choosing an appropriate method is a crucial aspect for meaningful counterfactual explanations. As documented in recent reviews, there exists a quickly growing literature with available methods. Yet, in the absence of widely available opensource implementations, the decision in favor of certain models is primarily based on what is readily available. Going forwa…
Due to the increasing use of machine learning in practice it becomes more and more important to be able to explain the prediction and behavior of machine learning models. An instance of explanations are counterfactual explanations which provide an intuitive and useful explanations of machine learning models. In this survey we review model-specific methods for efficiently computing counterfactual explanations of many different machine learning models and propose methods for models that have not been considered in literature so far.
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Radboud University（拉德堡德大学）
Model interpretability has become an important problem in machine learning (ML) due to the increased effect that algorithmic decisions have on humans. Counterfactual explanations can help users understand not only why ML models make certain decisions, but also how these decisions can be changed. We frame the problem of finding counterfactual explanations as a gradient-based optimization task and extend previous work that could only be applied to differentiable models. In order to accommodate non-differentiable models such as tree ensembles, we use probabilistic model approximations in the opti…
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 explanations of AI models in the context of decision making are counterfactual explanations. Yet, it is still an open research problem how to efficiently compute counterfactual explanations for many models. We investigate how to efficiently compute counterfactual explanations for an important class of models, prototype-based classifiers such as learning vector quant…
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Curtin University（科廷大学）
Counterfactual explanation is a form of interpretable machine learning that generates perturbations on a sample to achieve the desired outcome. The generated samples can act as instructions to guide end users on how to observe the desired results by altering samples. Although state-of-the-art counterfactual explanation methods are proposed to use variational autoencoder (VAE) to achieve promising improvements, they suffer from two major limitations: 1) the counterfactuals generation is prohibitively slow, which prevents algorithms from being deployed in interactive environments; 2) the counter…
Counterfactual explanation is an important Explainable AI technique to explain machine learning predictions. Despite being studied actively, existing optimization-based methods often assume that the underlying machine-learning model is differentiable and treat categorical attributes as continuous ones, which restricts their real-world applications when categorical attributes have many different values or the model is non-differentiable. To make counterfactual explanation suitable for real-world applications, we propose a novel framework of Model-Agnostic Counterfactual Explanation (MACE), whic…
We propose a novel method for explaining the predictions of any classifier. In our approach, local explanations are expected to explain both the outcome of a prediction and how that prediction would change if 'things had been different'. Furthermore, we argue that satisfactory explanations cannot be dissociated from a notion and measure of fidelity, as advocated in the early days of neural networks' knowledge extraction. We introduce a definition of fidelity to the underlying classifier for local explanation models which is based on distances to a target decision boundary. A system called CLEA…
Bielefeld University（比勒费尔德大学）；University of Cyprus（塞浦路斯大学）
Counterfactual explanations are a popular type of explanation for making the outcomes of a decision making system transparent to the user. Counterfactual explanations tell the user what to do in order to change the outcome of the system in a desirable way. However, it was recently discovered that the recommendations of what to do can differ significantly in their complexity between protected groups of individuals. Providing more difficult recommendations of actions to one group leads to a disadvantage of this group compared to other groups. In this work we propose a model-agnostic method for c…
Counterfactual examples are an appealing class of post-hoc explanations for machine learning models. Given input $x$ of class $y_1$, its counterfactual is a contrastive example $x^\prime$ of another class $y_0$. Current approaches primarily solve this task by a complex optimization: define an objective function based on the loss of the counterfactual outcome $y_0$ with hard or soft constraints, then optimize this function as a black-box. This "deep learning" approach, however, is rather slow, sometimes tricky, and may result in unrealistic counterfactual examples. In this work, we propose a no…
In this paper, we show that counterfactual explanations of confidence scores help users better understand and better trust an AI model's prediction in human-subject studies. Showing confidence scores in human-agent interaction systems can help build trust between humans and AI systems. However, most existing research only used the confidence score as a form of communication, and we still lack ways to explain why the algorithm is confident. This paper also presents two methods for understanding model confidence using counterfactual explanation: (1) based on counterfactual examples; and (2) base…
Accenture Labs（埃森哲实验室）；Accenture The Dock（埃森哲The Dock）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）
We predict credit applications with off-the-shelf, interchangeable black-box classifiers and we explain single predictions with counterfactual explanations. Counterfactual explanations expose the minimal changes required on the input data to obtain a different result e.g., approved vs rejected application. Despite their effectiveness, counterfactuals are mainly designed for changing an undesired outcome of a prediction i.e. loan rejected. Counterfactuals, however, can be difficult to interpret, especially when a high number of features are involved in the explanation. Our contribution is two-f…
As machine learning is increasingly used to inform consequential decision-making (e.g., pre-trial bail and loan approval), it becomes important to explain how the system arrived at its decision, and also suggest actions to achieve a favorable decision. Counterfactual explanations -- "how the world would have (had) to be different for a desirable outcome to occur" -- aim to satisfy these criteria. Existing works have primarily focused on designing algorithms to obtain counterfactual explanations for a wide range of settings. However, one of the main objectives of "explanations as a means to hel…
University of Augsburg（奥格斯堡大学）；Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学）
Counterfactual explanations are a common tool to explain artificial intelligence models. For Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents, they answer "Why not?" or "What if?" questions by illustrating what minimal change to a state is needed such that an agent chooses a different action. Generating counterfactual explanations for RL agents with visual input is especially challenging because of their large state spaces and because their decisions are part of an overarching policy, which includes long-term decision-making. However, research focusing on counterfactual explanations, specifically for RL age…
We tackle the problem of computing counterfactual explanations -- minimal changes to the features that flip an undesirable model prediction. We propose a solution to this question for linear Support Vector Machine (SVMs) models. Moreover, we introduce a way to account for weighted actions that allow for more changes in certain features than others. In particular, we show how to find counterfactual explanations with the purpose of increasing model interpretability. These explanations are valid, change only actionable features, are close to the data distribution, sparse, and take into account co…
Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute, Deakin University（迪肯大学应用人工智能研究所）；Deakin University（迪肯大学）
Motivation: Many high-performance DTA models have been proposed, but they are mostly black-box and thus lack human interpretability. Explainable AI (XAI) can make DTA models more trustworthy, and can also enable scientists to distill biological knowledge from the models. Counterfactual explanation is one popular approach to explaining the behaviour of a deep neural network, which works by systematically answering the question "How would the model output change if the inputs were changed in this way?". Most counterfactual explanation methods only operate on single input data. It remains an open…
University College Dublin（都柏林大学学院）；Insight Centre for Data Analytics（数据分析洞察中心）；VistaMilk SFI Research Centre（VistaMilk SFI研究中心）
There is a growing concern that the recent progress made in AI, especially regarding the predictive competence of deep learning models, will be undermined by a failure to properly explain their operation and outputs. In response to this disquiet counterfactual explanations have become massively popular in eXplainable AI (XAI) due to their proposed computational psychological, and legal benefits. In contrast however, semifactuals, which are a similar way humans commonly explain their reasoning, have surprisingly received no attention. Most counterfactual methods address tabular rather than imag…
Counterfactual explanations are a prominent example of post-hoc interpretability methods in the explainable Artificial Intelligence research domain. They provide individuals with alternative scenarios and a set of recommendations to achieve a sought-after machine learning model outcome. Recently, the literature has identified desiderata of counterfactual explanations, such as feasibility, actionability and sparsity that should support their applicability in real-world contexts. However, we show that the literature has neglected the problem of the time dependency of counterfactual explanations.…
TU Wien（维也纳工业大学）；Facebook（脸书）；UT Austin（得克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Machine learning (ML) models play an increasingly prevalent role in many software engineering tasks. However, because most models are now powered by opaque deep neural networks, it can be difficult for developers to understand why the model came to a certain conclusion and how to act upon the model's prediction. Motivated by this problem, this paper explores counterfactual explanations for models of source code. Such counterfactual explanations constitute minimal changes to the source code under which the model "changes its mind". We integrate counterfactual explanation generation to models of…
With the advent of GDPR, the domain of explainable AI and model interpretability has gained added impetus. Methods to extract and communicate visibility into decision-making models have become legal requirement. Two specific types of explanations, contrastive and counterfactual have been identified as suitable for human understanding. In this paper, we propose a model agnostic method and its systemic implementation to generate these explanations using shapely additive explanations (SHAP). We discuss a generative pipeline to create contrastive explanations and use it to further to generate coun…
Counterfactual explanations focus on "actionable knowledge" to help end-users understand how a machine learning outcome could be changed to a more desirable outcome. For this purpose a counterfactual explainer needs to discover input dependencies that relate to outcome changes. Identifying the minimum subset of feature changes needed to action an output change in the decision is an interesting challenge for counterfactual explainers. The DisCERN algorithm introduced in this paper is a case-based counter-factual explainer. Here counterfactuals are formed by replacing feature values from a neare…
