Real-world decision-making in public health and social science can greatly benefit from predictive models, yet translating predictions into effective interventions requires explaining the model behavior. While Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are well-suited for modeling relational data, existing explanation methods largely operate at the node level and fall short of supporting actionable, network-level intervention design. Existing counterfactual GNN explainers, such as CF-GNNExplainer and CF$^2$, rely on continuous mask optimization over features and edges, which implicitly assume feasible edge manipulation, may allocate effort to immutable or non-actionable attributes, and incur substantial computational overhead. Further, the method of arriving at the explanation itself is difficult to explain to a domain specialist who is not an AI expert. Can simple methods generate good explanations? To explore this, we reframe counterfactual explanation as an intervention design problem. At the local level, we generate counterfactuals via a greedy search that directly identifies minimal, actionable changes to node features and neighbor-level conditions. We derive conditions under which the greedy search provides guarantees, and empirically show that these conditions are approximately met. These counterfactuals are converted into interpretable rules suitable for real-world intervention. At the network level, we formulate intervention selection as a Disjunctive Normal Form (DNF) coverage problem under a budget constraint, which is nondecreasing and approximately submodular, enabling a greedy algorithm with theoretical guarantees. Experiments on synthetic graphs and real-world suicide risk networks demonstrate that our approach produces scalable, cost-effective intervention strategies with significantly improved efficiency over mask-based counterfactual methods.
Large language models (LLMs) can summarize heterogeneous user evidence in natural language, but current LLM recommenders often collapse enduring preferences, transient intent, and exposure-induced behavior into one profile. This makes recommendation vulnerable to feedback loops: repeated exposure is mistaken for preference, immediate clicks dominate delayed satisfaction, and fluent explanations need not reflect the ranking decision. We propose our method, a model-agnostic framework for long-horizon recommendation. Our method uses a frozen multimodal language model to convert item content and feedback into evidence-grounded semantic atoms, then maintains separate short-term, long-term, and exposure memories. Propensity-weighted updates reduce policy-induced exposure bias, while a conservative offline critic reranks candidates for delayed satisfaction under a behavior-support constraint. Explanations use only influential evidence atoms and are checked by counterfactual deletion. We provide an identification result and evaluate the framework in e-commerce-like, news-like, and short-video-like environments. Across ten seeds, our method improves discounted long-term value over the strongest alternative by 6.1%, 7.6%, and 6.7%, respectively. Twenty-seed paired ablations show significant value drops after removing propensity correction (0.739 +/- 0.191) or conservative support regularization (0.523 +/- 0.234). A frozen instruction language model also more than doubles semantic-atom NDCG over TF-IDF on a held-out paraphrase benchmark.
In bearing vibration datasets, most samples receive predicted fault probabilities close to 0 or 1, while samples with intermediate (gray-zone) probabilities are rare. Such borderline samples are important because they reflect conditions in which maintenance decisions may require additional inspection or a conservative response and are useful for studying decision boundaries. To address this scarcity, this paper proposes and compares two approaches that generate vibration signals whose predicted fault probability matches a target probability of 0.25, 0.50, or 0.75. We use the average output of a heterogeneous ensemble classifier with different architectures and random initializations as a fixed, gradient-accessible probability oracle. The first, training-based approach, Probability-Regularized Generative Adversarial Network (PR-GAN), extends Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network with Gradient Penalty (WGAN-GP) and edits a real signal through a residual generator while pushing the classifier output toward the target probability. The second is a training-free, per-sample Wachter-style counterfactual (CF) procedure that directly optimizes each input signal to reach the target probability while remaining close to the source signal. We evaluate both methods on the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) and Paderborn bearing datasets using mean absolute target-probability error, time-domain total variation, and frequency-domain log power spectral density (log-PSD) differences. Across all settings, CF reaches the target with a mean absolute probability error of 0.005-0.008 and a within-tolerance success rate of 1.000 on retained samples, whereas PR-GAN's mean error is 0.046-0.059 with success rates between 0.501 and 0.680. CF therefore steers the probability more reliably and requires smaller average L1 changes, whereas PR-GAN has a lower reported runtime in most settings.
Counterfactual explanation in abstract argumentation calls for an answer to the what-if query: would the topic argument still be accepted if the status of certain other arguments were changed? Existing approaches are limited to the but-for test and fail to accommodate more refined counterfactual conditions. To overcome these limitations, we introduce an intervention-based counterfactual reasoning framework in abstract argumentation. Our approach encodes the acceptance conditions of arguments as equations, then defines an intervention operator that supports (1) changing sets of arguments simultaneously, and (2) fixing witness arguments to their actual labels. Guided by the refined counterfactual condition introduced in the Halpern-Pearl definition, our method goes beyond the but-for test, thereby correctly identifying causes in argumentation structures such as Preemption and Overdetermination. Through comparison, we show that our method surpasses prior methods in both expressiveness and reliability.
Asiful Arefeen, Carol Johnston, Hassan Ghasemzadehcs.IR cs.AI cs.HC
Postprandial hyperglycemia is a key risk factor for metabolic disorders; however, existing dietary guidance is often static, impractical, and insufficiently personalized, providing recommendations that are difficult to follow or not impactful. While recent advances leverage continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) and machine learning to predict glycemic responses, these approaches are largely predictive and lack actionable guidance. Moreover, recommendation systems are often misaligned with user goals and require extensive input. We present MetaPlate, a counterfactual explanation (CF) guided, context-aware decision-support framework that generates personalized meal recommendations to mitigate postprandial glucose excursions in healthy adults. MetaPlate integrates multimodal data, including CGM readings, wearable-derived physiological signals, and user-provided meal inputs from $25$ individuals to model pre-meal context. A machine learning model predicts glucose response, while a CF optimization module adjusts meal composition modifying macronutrient amounts to maintain glucose levels within a target range ($\leq 140$ mg/dL). An LLM-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) layer enhances interpretability by producing human-readable recommendations using constrained search of the USDA food database. We evaluate MetaPlate via a structured expert-in-the-loop assessment with registered dietitians (RDs), comparing performance before and after prompt refinement. Results show improvements in meal realism, portion suitability, and recommendation likelihood, with expert feedback indicating a shift from clinically implausible outputs to actionable, contextually appropriate recommendations. Our findings emphasize the importance of domain knowledge and structured constraints in LLM-driven systems and highlight the potential of MetaPlate as a real-time personalized dietary decision-support tool.