{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/even-ifs-from-if-onlys-are-the-best-semi","title":"Even-Ifs From If-Onlys: Are the Best Semi-Factual Explanations Found Using Counterfactuals As Guides?","arxiv_id":"2403.00980","date":"2024-03-01","proceeding":null,"authors":["Saugat Aryal","Mark T. Keane"],"abstract":"Recently, counterfactuals using \"if-only\" explanations have become very popular in eXplainable AI (XAI), as they describe which changes to feature-inputs of a black-box AI system result in changes to a (usually negative) decision-outcome. Even more recently, semi-factuals using \"even-if\" explanations have gained more attention. They elucidate the feature-input changes that do not change the decision-outcome of the AI system, with a potential to suggest more beneficial recourses. Some semi-factual methods use counterfactuals to the query-instance to guide semi-factual production (so-called counterfactual-guided methods), whereas others do not (so-called counterfactual-free methods). In this work, we perform comprehensive tests of 8 semi-factual methods on 7 datasets using 5 key metrics, to determine whether counterfactual guidance is necessary to find the best semi-factuals. The results of these tests suggests not, but rather that computing other aspects of the decision space lead to better semi-factual XAI.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.00980v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.00980v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"even-ifs-from-if-onlys-are-the-best-semi","repo_url":"https://github.com/itsaugat/sf_methods","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"counterfactual"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"counterfactuals","method_name":"Counterfactuals"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}