Counterfactual Explanations offer an intuitive and straightforward way to explain Black Box Models but they are not unique. To address the need for plausible explanations, existing work has primarily relied on surrogate models to learn how the input data is distributed. This effectively reallocates the task of learning realistic representations of the data from the model itself to the surrogate. Consequently, the generated explanations may look plausible to humans but not necessarily conform with the behaviour of the Black Box Model. We formalise this notion of model conformity through the introduction of tailored evaluation measures and propose a novel algorithmic framework for generating \textbf{E}nergy-\textbf{C}onstrained \textbf{C}onformal \textbf{Co}unterfactuals that are only as plausible as the model permits. To do so, \textbf{ECCCo} leverages recent advances in energy-based modelling and predictive uncertainty quantification through conformal inference. Through illustrative examples and extensive empirical studies, we demonstrate that ECCos reconcile the need for plausibility and model conformity.
Counterfactual Explanations offer an intuitive and straightforward way to explain Black Box Models but they are not unique. To address the need for plausible explanations, existing work has primarily relied on surrogate models to learn how the input data is distributed. This effectively reallocates the task of learning realistic representations of the data from the model itself to the surrogate. Consequently, the generated explanations may look plausible to humans but not necessarily conform with the behaviour of the Black Box Model. We formalise this notion of model conformity through the introduction of tailored evaluation measures and propose a novel algorithmic framework for generating \textbf{E}nergy-\textbf{C}onstrained \textbf{C}onformal \textbf{Co}unterfactuals that are only as plausible as the model permits. To do so, \textbf{ECCCo} leverages recent advances in energy-based modelling and predictive uncertainty quantification through conformal inference. Through illustrative examples and extensive empirical studies, we demonstrate that ECCCos reconcile the need for plausibility and model conformity.
\end{abstract}
\section{Introduction}\label{intro}
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@@ -280,10 +280,12 @@ The entire procedure for Generating ECCCos is described in Algorithm~\ref{alg:ec
Finally, we search counterfactuals through gradient descent. Let $\mathcal{L}(\mathbf{z}^\prime,\mathbf{y}^*,\hat{\mathbf{x}}_{\theta, t})$ denote our loss function defined in Equation~\ref{eq:eccco}. Then in each iteration, we first randomly draw $n_{\mathcal{B}}$ samples from the buffer $\mathcal{B}$ before updating the counterfactual state $\mathbf{z}^\prime$ by moving in the negative direction of that loss function. The search terminates once the convergence criterium is met or the maximum number of iterations $T$ has been exhausted. Note that the choice of convergence criterium has important implications on the final counterfactual. For more detail on this see Appendix~\ref{app:eccco}).
Figure~\ref{fig:eccco-mnist} presents ECCCos for the MNIST example from Section~\ref{background} for various Black Box models of increasing complexity from left to right: a simple Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP); an Ensemble of MLPs, each of the same architecture as the single MLP; a Joint Energy Model (JEM) based on the same MLP architecture; and finally, an Ensemble of these JEMs. Since Deep Ensembles have an improved capacity for predictive uncertainty quantification and JEMs are explicitly trained to learn plausible representations of the input data, it is intuitive to see that the plausibility of counterfactuals visibly improves from left to right.
Figure~\ref{fig:eccco-mnist} presents ECCCos for the MNIST example from Section~\ref{background} for various Black Box models of increasing complexity from left to right: a simple Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP); an Ensemble of MLPs, each of the same architecture as the single MLP; a Joint Energy Model (JEM) based on the same MLP architecture; and finally, an Ensemble of these JEMs. Since Deep Ensembles have an improved capacity for predictive uncertainty quantification and JEMs are explicitly trained to learn plausible representations of the input data, it is intuitive to see that the plausibility of counterfactuals visibly improves from left to right. This provides some first anecdotal evidence that ECCCos achieve plausibility while maintaining faithfulness to the Black Box.
\section{Experiments}\label{conformity}
In this section, we bolster our anecdotal findings from the previous section through rigorous empirical analysis. We first briefly describe our evaluation framework and data, before presenting and discussing our results.
Above we have defined plausibility (\ref{def:plausible}) and conformity (\ref{def:conformal}) for Counterfactual Explanations. In this subsection, we introduce evaluation measures that facilitate a quantitative evaluation of counterfactuals for these objectives.
