Process mining is widely used to diagnose processes and uncover performance and compliance problems. It is also possible to see relations between different behavioral aspects, e.g., cases that deviate more at the beginning of the process tend to get delayed in the later part of the process. However, correlations do not necessarily reveal causalities. Moreover, standard process mining diagnostics do not indicate how to improve the process. This is the reason we advocate the use of structural equation models and counterfactual reasoning. We use results from causal inference and adapt these to be able to reason over event logs and process interventions. We have implemented the approach as a ProM plug-in and have evaluated it on several data sets.
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）
Counterfactual reasoning requires predicting how alternative events, contrary to what actually happened, might have resulted in different outcomes. Despite being considered a necessary component of AI-complete systems, few resources have been developed for evaluating counterfactual reasoning in narratives. In this paper, we propose Counterfactual Story Rewriting: given an original story and an intervening counterfactual event, the task is to minimally revise the story to make it compatible with the given counterfactual event. Solving this task will require deep understanding of causal narrativ…
We present a novel formalization of counterfactual conditionals in a quantified modal logic. Counterfactual conditionals play a vital role in ethical and moral reasoning. Prior work has shown that moral reasoning systems (and more generally, theory-of-mind reasoning systems) should be at least as expressive as first-order (quantified) modal logic (QML) to be well-behaved. While existing work on moral reasoning has focused on counterfactual-free QML moral reasoning, we present a fully specified and implemented formal system that includes counterfactual conditionals. We validate our model with t…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
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 inherently different from us humans who have counterfactual thinking, e.g., to scrutinize for the hard testing samples. Inspired by this, we propose a Counterfactual Reasoning Model, which mimics the counterfactual thinking by learning from few counterfactual samples. In particular, we devise a generation module to generate representative counterfactual samples fo…
Polytechnic University of Bari（巴里理工大学）；University of Bari（巴里大学）
The increasing application of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning models poses potential risks of unfair behavior and, in light of recent regulations, has attracted the attention of the research community. Several researchers focused on seeking new fairness definitions or developing approaches to identify biased predictions. However, none try to exploit the counterfactual space to this aim. In that direction, the methodology proposed in this work aims to unveil unfair model behaviors using counterfactual reasoning in the case of fairness under unawareness setting. A counterfactual ver…
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.
CRiT-QA: Evaluating Multi-hop Reasoning with Counterfactual Chains and Distractor Traps
Department of Artificial Intelligence, Chung-Ang University（Chung-Ang大学人工智能系）；Graduate School of Advanced Imaging Sciences, Multimedia and Film, Chung-Ang University（Chung-Ang大学高级成像科学研究院，多媒体与电影）
Multi-hop QA requires reasoning over multiple supporting facts to answer the question. However, the existing QA models always rely on shortcuts, e.g., providing the true answer by only one fact, rather than multi-hop reasoning, which is referred as $\textit{disconnected reasoning}$ problem. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel counterfactual multihop QA, a causal-effect approach that enables to reduce the disconnected reasoning. It builds upon explicitly modeling of causality: 1) the direct causal effects of disconnected reasoning and 2) the causal effect of true multi-hop reasoning fro…
The semantics for counterfactuals due to David Lewis has been challenged on the basis of unlikely, or impossible, events. Such events may skew a given similarity order in favour of those possible worlds which exhibit them. By updating the relational structure of a model according to a ceteris paribus clause one forces out, in a natural manner, those possible worlds which do not satisfy the requirements of the clause. We develop a ceteris paribus logic for counterfactual reasoning capable of performing such actions, and offer several alternative (relaxed) interpretations of ceteris paribus. We …
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust（牛津大学医院NHS基金会信托）
Most machine learning (ML) models are developed for prediction only; offering no option for causal interpretation of their predictions or parameters/properties. This can hamper the health systems' ability to employ ML models in clinical decision-making processes, where the need and desire for predicting outcomes under hypothetical investigations (i.e., counterfactual reasoning/explanation) is high. In this research, we introduce a new representation learning framework (i.e., partial concept bottleneck), which considers the provision of counterfactual explanations as an embedded property of the…
Humans use causality and hypothetical retrospection in their daily decision-making, planning, and understanding of life events. The human mind, while retrospecting a given situation, think about questions such as "What was the cause of the given situation?", "What would be the effect of my action?", or "Which action led to this effect?". It develops a causal model of the world, which learns with fewer data points, makes inferences, and contemplates counterfactual scenarios. The unseen, unknown, scenarios are known as counterfactuals. AI algorithms use a representation based on knowledge graphs…
Explainable Counterfactual Reasoning in Depression Medication Selection at Multi-Levels (Personalized and Population)
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Cullen College of Engineering（生物医学工程系，工程学院）；University of Houston（德克萨斯大学）；Department of Health Systems & Population Health Sciences, Tilman J. Fertitta Family College of Medicine（健康系统与人群健康科学系，蒂尔曼·J·费尔蒂塔家庭医学院）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工学院）
Consider the case where causal relations among variables can be described as a Gaussian linear structural equation model. This paper deals with the problem of clarifying how the variance of a response variable would have changed if a treatment variable were assigned to some value (counterfactually), given that a set of variables is observed (actually). In order to achieve this aim, we reformulate the formulas of the counterfactual distribution proposed by Balke and Pearl (1995) through both the total effects and a covariance matrix of observed variables. We further extend the framework of Balk…
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Curtin University（科廷大学）
Counterfactual explanations interpret the recommendation mechanism via exploring how minimal alterations on items or users affect the recommendation decisions. Existing counterfactual explainable approaches face huge search space and their explanations are either action-based (e.g., user click) or aspect-based (i.e., item description). We believe item attribute-based explanations are more intuitive and persuadable for users since they explain by fine-grained item demographic features (e.g., brand). Moreover, counterfactual explanation could enhance recommendations by filtering out negative ite…
DeFacto: Counterfactual Thinking with Images for Enforcing Evidence-Grounded and Faithful Reasoning
Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China（清华大学自动化系）；Zhongguancun Academy, Beijing, China（中关村学院）；School of Software, Xinjiang University, Urumqi, China（新疆大学软件学院）；College of Materials Science and Engineering, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou, China（福州大学材料科学与工程学院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Beijing Qianjue Technology Co., Ltd., Beijing, China（北京千 jue 技术有限公司）
Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute (AI), Deakin University（迪肯大学应用人工智能研究所）
Data augmentation is one of the most successful techniques to improve the classification accuracy of machine learning models in computer vision. However, applying data augmentation to tabular data is a challenging problem since it is hard to generate synthetic samples with labels. In this paper, we propose an efficient classifier with a novel data augmentation technique for tabular data. Our method called CCRAL combines causal reasoning to learn counterfactual samples for the original training samples and active learning to select useful counterfactual samples based on a region of uncertainty.…
University of Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；University of Modena and Reggio Emilia（摩德纳-雷焦艾米利亚大学）
Deep learning is bringing remarkable contributions to the field of argumentation mining, but the existing approaches still need to fill the gap toward performing advanced reasoning tasks. In this position paper, we posit that neural-symbolic and statistical relational learning could play a crucial role in the integration of symbolic and sub-symbolic methods to achieve this goal.
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.
The ability to adapt to changes in environmental contingencies is an important challenge in reinforcement learning. Indeed, transferring previously acquired knowledge to environments with unseen structural properties can greatly enhance the flexibility and efficiency by which novel optimal policies may be constructed. In this work, we study the problem of transfer learning under changes in the environment dynamics. In this study, we apply causal reasoning in the offline reinforcement learning setting to transfer a learned policy to new environments. Specifically, we use the Decision Transforme…
Existing studies on disease diagnostic models focus either on diagnostic model learning for performance improvement or on the visual explanation of a trained diagnostic model. We propose a novel learn-explain-reinforce (LEAR) framework that unifies diagnostic model learning, visual explanation generation (explanation unit), and trained diagnostic model reinforcement (reinforcement unit) guided by the visual explanation. For the visual explanation, we generate a counterfactual map that transforms an input sample to be identified as an intended target label. For example, a counterfactual map can…
