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Poster

Natural Counterfactuals With Necessary Backtracking

GUANG-YUAN HAO · Jiji Zhang · Biwei Huang · Hao Wang · Kun Zhang

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Wed 11 Dec 4:30 p.m. PST — 7:30 p.m. PST

Abstract:

Counterfactual reasoning is pivotal in human cognition and especially important for providing explanations and making decisions. While Judea Pearl's influential approach is theoretically elegant, its generation of a counterfactual scenario often requires too much deviation from the observed scenarios to be feasible, as we show using simple examples. To mitigate this difficulty, we propose a framework of natural counterfactuals and a method for generating counterfactuals that are more feasible with respect to the actual data distribution. Our methodology incorporates a certain amount of backtracking when needed, allowing changes in causally preceding variables to minimize deviations from realistic scenarios. Specifically, we introduce a novel optimization framework that permits but also controls the extent of backtracking with a ``naturalness'' criterion. Empirical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

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