12,797 research outputs found
Counterfactual Explanation for Fairness in Recommendation
Fairness-aware recommendation eliminates discrimination issues to build
trustworthy recommendation systems.Explaining the causes of unfair
recommendations is critical, as it promotes fairness diagnostics, and thus
secures users' trust in recommendation models. Existing fairness explanation
methods suffer high computation burdens due to the large-scale search space and
the greedy nature of the explanation search process. Besides, they perform
score-based optimizations with continuous values, which are not applicable to
discrete attributes such as gender and race. In this work, we adopt the novel
paradigm of counterfactual explanation from causal inference to explore how
minimal alterations in explanations change model fairness, to abandon the
greedy search for explanations. We use real-world attributes from Heterogeneous
Information Networks (HINs) to empower counterfactual reasoning on discrete
attributes. We propose a novel Counterfactual Explanation for Fairness
(CFairER) that generates attribute-level counterfactual explanations from HINs
for recommendation fairness. Our CFairER conducts off-policy reinforcement
learning to seek high-quality counterfactual explanations, with an attentive
action pruning reducing the search space of candidate counterfactuals. The
counterfactual explanations help to provide rational and proximate explanations
for model fairness, while the attentive action pruning narrows the search space
of attributes. Extensive experiments demonstrate our proposed model can
generate faithful explanations while maintaining favorable recommendation
performance
On the Substitution of Identicals in Counterfactual Reasoning
It is widely held that counterfactuals, unlike attitude ascriptions, preserve the referential transparency of their constituents, i.e., that counterfactuals validate the substitution of identicals when their constituents do. The only putative counterexamples in the literature come from counterpossibles, i.e., counterfactuals with impossible antecedents. Advocates of counterpossibilism, i.e., the view that counterpossibles are not all vacuous, argue that counterpossibles can generate referential opacity. But in order to explain why most substitution inferences into counterfactuals seem valid, counterpossibilists also often maintain that counterfactuals with possible antecedents are transparencyâpreserving. I argue that if counterpossibles can generate opacity, then so can ordinary counterfactuals with possible antecedents. Utilizing an analogy between counterfactuals and attitude ascriptions, I provide a counterpossibilistâfriendly explanation for the apparent validity of substitution inferences into counterfactuals. I conclude by suggesting that the debate over counterpossibles is closely tied to questions concerning the extent to which counterfactuals are more like attitude ascriptions and epistemic operators than previously recognized
(WP 2018-02) Extending Behavioral Economicsâ Methodological Critique of Rational Choice Theory to Include Counterfactual Reasoning
This paper extends behavioral economicsâ realist methodological critique of rational choice theory to include the type of logical reasoning underlying its axiomatic foundations. A purely realist critique ignores Kahnemanâs emphasis on how the theoryâs axiomatic foundations make it normative. I extend his critique to the theoryâs reliance on classical logic, which excludes the concept of possibility employed in counterfactual reasoning. Nudge theory reflects this in employing counterfactual conditionals. This answers the complaint that the Homo sapiens agent conception ultimately reduces to a Homo economicus conception, and also provides grounds for treating Homo sapiens as an adaptive, non-optimizing, reflexive agent
Is there a reliability challenge for logic?
There are many domains about which we think we are reliable. When there is prima facie reason to believe that there is no satisfying explanation of our reliability about a domain given our background views about the world, this generates a challenge to our reliability about the domain or to our background views. This is what is often called the reliability challenge for the domain. In previous work, I discussed the reliability challenges for logic and for deductive inference. I argued for four main claims: First, there are reliability challenges for logic and for deduction. Second, these reliability challenges cannot be answered merely by providing an explanation of how it is that we have the logical beliefs and employ the deductive rules that we do. Third, we can explain our reliability about logic by appealing to our reliability about deduction. Fourth, there is a good prospect for providing an evolutionary explanation of the reliability of our deductive reasoning. In recent years, a number of arguments have appeared in the literature that can be applied against one or more of these four theses. In this paper, I respond to some of these arguments. In particular, I discuss arguments by Paul Horwich, Jack Woods, Dan Baras, Justin Clarke-Doane, and Hartry Field
When Causal Intervention Meets Adversarial Examples and Image Masking for Deep Neural Networks
Discovering and exploiting the causality in deep neural networks (DNNs) are
crucial challenges for understanding and reasoning causal effects (CE) on an
explainable visual model. "Intervention" has been widely used for recognizing a
causal relation ontologically. In this paper, we propose a causal inference
framework for visual reasoning via do-calculus. To study the intervention
effects on pixel-level features for causal reasoning, we introduce pixel-wise
masking and adversarial perturbation. In our framework, CE is calculated using
features in a latent space and perturbed prediction from a DNN-based model. We
further provide the first look into the characteristics of discovered CE of
adversarially perturbed images generated by gradient-based methods
\footnote{~~https://github.com/jjaacckkyy63/Causal-Intervention-AE-wAdvImg}.
Experimental results show that CE is a competitive and robust index for
understanding DNNs when compared with conventional methods such as
class-activation mappings (CAMs) on the Chest X-Ray-14 dataset for
human-interpretable feature(s) (e.g., symptom) reasoning. Moreover, CE holds
promises for detecting adversarial examples as it possesses distinct
characteristics in the presence of adversarial perturbations.Comment: Noted our camera-ready version has changed the title. "When Causal
Intervention Meets Adversarial Examples and Image Masking for Deep Neural
Networks" as the v3 official paper title in IEEE Proceeding. Please use it in
your formal reference. Accepted at IEEE ICIP 2019. Pytorch code has released
on https://github.com/jjaacckkyy63/Causal-Intervention-AE-wAdvIm
Ceteris Paribus Laws
Laws of nature take center stage in philosophy of science. Laws are usually believed to stand in a tight conceptual relation to many important key concepts such as causation, explanation, confirmation, determinism, counterfactuals etc. Traditionally, philosophers of science have focused on physical laws, which were taken to be at least true, universal statements that support counterfactual claims. But, although this claim about laws might be true with respect to physics, laws in the special sciences (such as biology, psychology, economics etc.) appear to haveâmaybe not surprisinglyâdifferent features than the laws of physics. Special science lawsâfor instance, the economic law âUnder the condition of perfect competition, an increase of demand of a commodity leads to an increase of price, given that the quantity of the supplied commodity remains constantâ and, in biology, Mendel's Lawsâare usually taken to âhave exceptionsâ, to be ânon-universalâ or âto be ceteris paribus lawsâ. How and whether the laws of physics and the laws of the special sciences differ is one of the crucial questions motivating the debate on ceteris paribus laws. Another major, controversial question concerns the determination of the precise meaning of âceteris paribusâ. Philosophers have attempted to explicate the meaning of ceteris paribus clauses in different ways. The question of meaning is connected to the problem of empirical content, i.e., the question whether ceteris paribus laws have non-trivial and empirically testable content. Since many philosophers have argued that ceteris paribus laws lack empirically testable content, this problem constitutes a major challenge to a theory of ceteris paribus laws
Subjective Causality and Counterfactuals in the Social Sciences
The article explores the role that subjective evidence of causality and associated counterfactuals and counterpotentials might play in the social sciences where comparative cases are scarce. This scarcity rules out statistical inference based upon frequencies and usually invites in-depth ethnographic studies. Thus, if causality is to be preserved in such situations, a conception of ethnographic causal inference is required. Ethnographic causality inverts the standard statistical concept of causal explanation in observational studies, whereby comparison and generalization, across a sample of cases, are both necessary prerequisites for any causal inference. Ethnographic causality allows, in contrast, for causal explanation prior to any subsequent comparison or generalization
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