NOMATTERXAI: Generating “No Matter What” Alterfactual Examples for Explaining Black-Box Text Classification Models

Content not yet available

This lecture has no active video or poster.

AAAI 2025

February 28, 2025

Philadelphia, United States

Would you like to see your presentation here, made available to a global audience of researchers?
Add your own presentation or have us affordably record your next conference.

keywords:

ml

interpretable

transparent

explainable

In Explainable AI (XAI), counterfactual explanations (CEs) are a well-studied method to communicate feature relevance through contrastive reasoning of "what if" to explain AI models' predictions. However, they only focus on important (i.e., relevant) features and largely disregard less important (i.e., irrelevant) ones. Such \textit{irrelevant features} can be crucial in many applications, especially when users need to ensure that an AI model's decisions are not affected or biased against specific attributes such as gender, race, religion, or political affiliation. To address this gap, the concept of alterfactual explanations (AEs) has been proposed. AEs explore an alternative reality of "no matter what", where irrelevant features are substituted with alternative features (e.g., "republicans" ->"democrats") within the same attribute (e.g., "politics") while maintaining a similar prediction output. This serves to validate whether AI model predictions are influenced by the specified attributes. Despite the promise of AEs, there is a lack of computational approaches to systematically generate them, particularly in the text domain, where creating AEs for AI text classifiers presents unique challenges. This paper addresses this challenge by formulating AE generation as an optimization problem and introducing {\mymethod}, a novel algorithm that generates AEs for text classification tasks. Our approach achieves high fidelity of up to 95% while preserving context similarity of over 90% across multiple models and datasets. A human study further validates the effectiveness of AEs in explaining AI text classifiers to end users. All codes will be publicly available.

Downloads

SlidesPaper

Next from AAAI 2025

Neighborhood-Aware Negative Sampling for Student Knowledge and Behavior Modeling
poster

Neighborhood-Aware Negative Sampling for Student Knowledge and Behavior Modeling

AAAI 2025

Siqian Zhao and 1 other author

28 February 2025

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

Select topic of interest (you can select more than one)

PRESENTATIONS

  • All Presentations
  • For Librarians
  • Resource Center
  • Free Trial
Underline Science, Inc.
1216 Broadway, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10001, USA

© 2026 Underline - All rights reserved