| Challenge: | Existing methods to explain ML tasks for natural language text are either unrealistic or introduce imperceptible changes. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines a conditional GAN and embeddings of a pretrained BERT encoder to model-agnostically generate realistic natural language text counterfactuals for explaining regression and classification tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on fidelity and human judgments of naturalness across multiple datasets and multiple predictive models. |
Similar Papers
A Survey on Natural Language Counterfactual Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in NLP are driven by a variety of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT-3 (175B) and PaLM (540B). |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy that categorizes the methods into four groups and summarizes the metrics for evaluating the generation quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy categorizes the generation methods into four groups and summarizes the metrics for evaluating the quality. |
What if This Modified That? Syntactic Interventions with Counterfactual Embeddings (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prior art aims to uncover meaningful properties within model representations, but it is unclear how faithfully such probes portray information that the models actually use. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique for generating counterfactual embeddings within models . they produce evidence that some models use a tree-distancelike representation of syntax . |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique produces evidence that some models use tree-distancelike representations of syntax in downstream prediction tasks. |
Empowering Language Understanding with Counterfactual Reasoning (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for language understanding use the recognized patterns in the testing phase that are inherently different from us humans who have counterfactual thinking. |
| Approach: | They propose a counterfactual Reasoning Model which mimics counterfactive thinking by learning from few counterffact samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can detect and make predictions from textual patterns . it can also detect negative sarcastic puns by comparing them with imaginations . |
Polyjuice: Generating Counterfactuals for Explaining, Evaluating, and Improving Models (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing counterfactual generation methods rely on manual labor to create very few counterf actuals or only instantiate limited types of perturbations such as paraphrases or word substitutions. |
| Approach: | They propose a general-purpose counterfactual generator that allows for control over perturbation types and locations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed generator produces diverse sets of realistic counterfactuals that are useful in various applications. |
Counterfactual reasoning: Testing language models’ understanding of hypothetical scenarios (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing language models have demonstrated remarkable improvements in downstream tasks, but it remains unclear to what extent they are consequences of correlation with linguistic heuristics versus robust reasoning about causal relations grounded on understanding of world knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to test language models with counterfactual conditionals to test their ability to distinguish hypothetical scenarios from reality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model overrides real-world knowledge in counterfactual scenarios, but most models are driven by lexical cues. |
Prompting Large Language Models for Counterfactual Generation: An Empirical Study (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in a wide range of natural language understanding and generation tasks, but their ability to generate counterfactuals has not been examined systematically. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate LLMs' ability to generate counterfactuals based on key factors including intrinsic properties and prompt design. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework examines the strengths and weaknesses of large language models (LLMs) and identifies factors that influence their ability to generate counterfactuals. |
Counter-Contrastive Learning for Language GANs (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have proven to be difficult to generate natural language due to the uninformative learning signals passed from the discriminator. |
| Approach: | They propose to adopt the counter-contrastive learning method to support the generator’s training in language GANs by pulling the language representations of generated and real samples together and pushing apart representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing GANs on synthetic and real benchmarks and yields competitive performance compared to previous methods. |
Exploring the Efficacy of Automatically Generated Counterfactuals for Sentiment Analysis (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve performance of deep neural models are limited by the nature of spurious patterns in the data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use augmented data to generate spurious patterns in NLP models . they propose to generate counterfactual data for data augmentation and explanation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance on augmented data and on human-generated data. |
Counterfactuals of Counterfactuals: a back-translation-inspired approach to analyse counterfactual editors (2023.findings-acl)
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George Filandrianos, Edmund Dervakos, Orfeas Menis Mastromichalakis, Chrysoula Zerva, Giorgos Stamou
| Challenge: | Existing explanations for classifiers are counterfactual or contrastive . lack of universal ground truth for counterf actual edits hinders their evaluation . |
| Approach: | They propose a back translation-inspired evaluation methodology that utilises earlier outputs of the explainer as ground truth proxies to investigate the consistency of explainers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can provide valuable insights into the behaviour of predictor and explainer models and infer patterns that would otherwise be obscured. |
Parallel Universes, Parallel Languages: A Comprehensive Study on LLM-based Multilingual Counterfactual Example Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Qianli Wang, Van Bach Nguyen, Yihong Liu, Fedor Splitt, Nils Feldhus, Christin Seifert, Hinrich Schuetze, Sebastian Möller, Vera Schmitt
| Challenge: | Large language models excel at generating English counterfactuals but their effectiveness in generating multilingual counterfacts remains unclear. |
| Approach: | They conduct automatic evaluations on both directly generated and derived counterfactuals in six languages and find that cross-lingual perturbations follow common strategic principles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models show that translation-based counterfactuals offer higher validity than their directly generated counterparts, but still fall short of matching the quality of the original English counterf actuals. |