Papers › Counterfactual Explanations for Neural Recommenders
Counterfactual Explanations for Neural Recommenders
Khanh Hiep Tran, Azin Ghazimatin, Rishiraj Saha Roy
Understanding why specific items are recommended to users can significantly increase their trust and satisfaction in the system. While neural recommenders have become the state-of-the-art in recent years, the complexity of deep models still makes the generation of tangible explanations for end users a challenging problem. Existing methods are usually based on attention distributions over a variety of features, which are still questionable regarding their suitability as explanations, and rather unwieldy to grasp for an end user. Counterfactual explanations based on a small set of the user's own actions have been shown to be an acceptable solution to the tangibility problem. However, current work on such counterfactuals cannot be readily applied to neural models. In this work, we propose ACCENT, the first general framework for finding counterfactual explanations for neural recommenders. It extends recently-proposed influence functions for identifying training points most relevant to a recommendation, from a single to a pair of items, while deducing a counterfactual set in an iterative process. We use ACCENT to generate counterfactual explanations for two popular neural models, Neural Collaborative Filtering (NCF) and Relational Collaborative Filtering (RCF), and demonstrate its feasibility on a sample of the popular MovieLens 100K dataset.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="2105.05008")
Code
Syntology Ran 2 of 2 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 0 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran · honoured contract; 1 ran · violated contract.
By repository: official repository: 2 samples from 1 repository, 2 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
2 samples harvested; 2 ran; 1 honoured the contract we drafted; 0 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.
Licence: 2 of the 2 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.
Harvested from hieptk/accent. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.
Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.
Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.
e718f5c5a25ad390 · report
c1cef37eec5ef8ea · report
Tasks
1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Methods
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections