In many applications, it is important to be able to explain the decisions of machine learning systems. An increasingly popular approach has been to seek to provide \emph{counterfactual instance explanations}. These specify close possible worlds in which, contrary to the facts, a person receives their desired decision from the machine learning system. This paper will draw on literature from the philosophy of science to argue that a satisfactory explanation must consist of both counterfactual instances and a causal equation (or system of equations) that support the counterfactual instances. We will show that counterfactual instances by themselves explain little. We will further illustrate how explainable AI methods that provide both causal equations and counterfactual instances can successfully explain machine learning predictions.
相關內容
Explainability for machine learning models has gained considerable attention within the research community given the importance of deploying more reliable machine-learning systems. In computer vision applications, generative counterfactual methods indicate how to perturb a model's input to change its prediction, providing details about the model's decision-making. Current methods tend to generate trivial counterfactuals about a model's decisions, as they often suggest to exaggerate or remove the presence of the attribute being classified. For the machine learning practitioner, these types of counterfactuals offer little value, since they provide no new information about undesired model or data biases. In this work, we identify the problem of trivial counterfactual generation and we propose DiVE to alleviate it. DiVE learns a perturbation in a disentangled latent space that is constrained using a diversity-enforcing loss to uncover multiple valuable explanations about the model's prediction. Further, we introduce a mechanism to prevent the model from producing trivial explanations. Experiments on CelebA and Synbols demonstrate that our model improves the success rate of producing high-quality valuable explanations when compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at //github.com/ElementAI/beyond-trivial-explanations.
Counterfactual explanations are usually generated through heuristics that are sensitive to the search's initial conditions. The absence of guarantees of performance and robustness hinders trustworthiness. In this paper, we take a disciplined approach towards counterfactual explanations for tree ensembles. We advocate for a model-based search aiming at "optimal" explanations and propose efficient mixed-integer programming approaches. We show that isolation forests can be modeled within our framework to focus the search on plausible explanations with a low outlier score. We provide comprehensive coverage of additional constraints that model important objectives, heterogeneous data types, structural constraints on the feature space, along with resource and actionability restrictions. Our experimental analyses demonstrate that the proposed search approach requires a computational effort that is orders of magnitude smaller than previous mathematical programming algorithms. It scales up to large data sets and tree ensembles, where it provides, within seconds, systematic explanations grounded on well-defined models solved to optimality.
Feature attribution is often loosely presented as the process of selecting a subset of relevant features as a rationale of a prediction. This lack of clarity stems from the fact that we usually do not have access to any notion of ground-truth attribution and from a more general debate on what good interpretations are. In this paper we propose to formalise feature selection/attribution based on the concept of relaxed functional dependence. In particular, we extend our notions to the instance-wise setting and derive necessary properties for candidate selection solutions, while leaving room for task-dependence. By computing ground-truth attributions on synthetic datasets, we evaluate many state-of-the-art attribution methods and show that, even when optimised, some fail to verify the proposed properties and provide wrong solutions.
We present a novel counterfactual framework for both Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) and Open-Set Recognition (OSR), whose common challenge is generalizing to the unseen-classes by only training on the seen-classes. Our idea stems from the observation that the generated samples for unseen-classes are often out of the true distribution, which causes severe recognition rate imbalance between the seen-class (high) and unseen-class (low). We show that the key reason is that the generation is not Counterfactual Faithful, and thus we propose a faithful one, whose generation is from the sample-specific counterfactual question: What would the sample look like, if we set its class attribute to a certain class, while keeping its sample attribute unchanged? Thanks to the faithfulness, we can apply the Consistency Rule to perform unseen/seen binary classification, by asking: Would its counterfactual still look like itself? If ``yes'', the sample is from a certain class, and ``no'' otherwise. Through extensive experiments on ZSL and OSR, we demonstrate that our framework effectively mitigates the seen/unseen imbalance and hence significantly improves the overall performance. Note that this framework is orthogonal to existing methods, thus, it can serve as a new baseline to evaluate how ZSL/OSR models generalize. Codes are available at //github.com/yue-zhongqi/gcm-cf.
Recent VQA models may tend to rely on language bias as a shortcut and thus fail to sufficiently learn the multi-modal knowledge from both vision and language. In this paper, we investigate how to capture and mitigate language bias in VQA. Motivated by causal effects, we proposed a novel counterfactual inference framework, which enables us to capture the language bias as the direct causal effect of questions on answers and reduce the language bias by subtracting the direct language effect from the total causal effect. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed counterfactual inference framework 1) is general to various VQA backbones and fusion strategies, 2) achieves competitive performance on the language-bias sensitive VQA-CP dataset while performs robustly on the balanced VQA v2 dataset.
Optimizing ranking systems based on user interactions is a well-studied problem. State-of-the-art methods for optimizing ranking systems based on user interactions are divided into online approaches - that learn by directly interacting with users - and counterfactual approaches - that learn from historical interactions. Existing online methods are hindered without online interventions and thus should not be applied counterfactually. Conversely, counterfactual methods cannot directly benefit from online interventions. We propose a novel intervention-aware estimator for both counterfactual and online Learning to Rank (LTR). With the introduction of the intervention-aware estimator, we aim to bridge the online/counterfactual LTR division as it is shown to be highly effective in both online and counterfactual scenarios. The estimator corrects for the effect of position bias, trust bias, and item-selection bias by using corrections based on the behavior of the logging policy and on online interventions: changes to the logging policy made during the gathering of click data. Our experimental results, conducted in a semi-synthetic experimental setup, show that, unlike existing counterfactual LTR methods, the intervention-aware estimator can greatly benefit from online interventions.
Machine learning plays a role in many deployed decision systems, often in ways that are difficult or impossible to understand by human stakeholders. Explaining, in a human-understandable way, the relationship between the input and output of machine learning models is essential to the development of trustworthy machine-learning-based systems. A burgeoning body of research seeks to define the goals and methods of explainability in machine learning. In this paper, we seek to review and categorize research on counterfactual explanations, a specific class of explanation that provides a link between what could have happened had input to a model been changed in a particular way. Modern approaches to counterfactual explainability in machine learning draw connections to the established legal doctrine in many countries, making them appealing to fielded systems in high-impact areas such as finance and healthcare. Thus, we design a rubric with desirable properties of counterfactual explanation algorithms and comprehensively evaluate all currently-proposed algorithms against that rubric. Our rubric provides easy comparison and comprehension of the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches and serves as an introduction to major research themes in this field. We also identify gaps and discuss promising research directions in the space of counterfactual explainability.
Incorporating knowledge graph (KG) into recommender system is promising in improving the recommendation accuracy and explainability. However, existing methods largely assume that a KG is complete and simply transfer the "knowledge" in KG at the shallow level of entity raw data or embeddings. This may lead to suboptimal performance, since a practical KG can hardly be complete, and it is common that a KG has missing facts, relations, and entities. Thus, we argue that it is crucial to consider the incomplete nature of KG when incorporating it into recommender system. In this paper, we jointly learn the model of recommendation and knowledge graph completion. Distinct from previous KG-based recommendation methods, we transfer the relation information in KG, so as to understand the reasons that a user likes an item. As an example, if a user has watched several movies directed by (relation) the same person (entity), we can infer that the director relation plays a critical role when the user makes the decision, thus help to understand the user's preference at a finer granularity. Technically, we contribute a new translation-based recommendation model, which specially accounts for various preferences in translating a user to an item, and then jointly train it with a KG completion model by combining several transfer schemes. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art KG-based recommendation methods. Further analysis verifies the positive effect of joint training on both tasks of recommendation and KG completion, and the advantage of our model in understanding user preference. We publish our project at //github.com/TaoMiner/joint-kg-recommender.
Predictive models can fail to generalize from training to deployment environments because of dataset shift, posing a threat to model reliability and the safety of downstream decisions made in practice. Instead of using samples from the target distribution to reactively correct dataset shift, we use graphical knowledge of the causal mechanisms relating variables in a prediction problem to proactively remove relationships that do not generalize across environments, even when these relationships may depend on unobserved variables (violations of the "no unobserved confounders" assumption). To accomplish this, we identify variables with unstable paths of statistical influence and remove them from the model. We also augment the causal graph with latent counterfactual variables that isolate unstable paths of statistical influence, allowing us to retain stable paths that would otherwise be removed. Our experiments demonstrate that models that remove vulnerable variables and use estimates of the latent variables transfer better, often outperforming in the target domain despite some accuracy loss in the training domain.
Most existing works in visual question answering (VQA) are dedicated to improving the accuracy of predicted answers, while disregarding the explanations. We argue that the explanation for an answer is of the same or even more importance compared with the answer itself, since it makes the question and answering process more understandable and traceable. To this end, we propose a new task of VQA-E (VQA with Explanation), where the computational models are required to generate an explanation with the predicted answer. We first construct a new dataset, and then frame the VQA-E problem in a multi-task learning architecture. Our VQA-E dataset is automatically derived from the VQA v2 dataset by intelligently exploiting the available captions. We have conducted a user study to validate the quality of explanations synthesized by our method. We quantitatively show that the additional supervision from explanations can not only produce insightful textual sentences to justify the answers, but also improve the performance of answer prediction. Our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a clear margin on the VQA v2 dataset.
小貼士
登錄享
相關主題
注冊地址： 北京市海淀區羊坊店路18號2幢3層301-191