CEL: Comprehensive Counterfactual Explanations Library and Benchmark
Mirrored from arXiv — Machine Learning for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
Computer Science > Machine Learning
Title:CEL: Comprehensive Counterfactual Explanations Library and Benchmark
Abstract:Counterfactual explanations are a prominent approach in explainable artificial intelligence (xAI), providing actionable guidance on what input changes would alter a model's prediction to a desired outcome. While early methods primarily focused on minimal feature changes, recent work incorporates additional properties such as sparsity, actionability and plausibility. Despite this progress, fair and systematic evaluation remains challenging. Existing studies often rely on different data splits, predictive models, and evaluation metrics, which limits objective comparison across methods. To fill this gap, we introduce CEL (Counterfactual Explanations Library), a unified library and benchmark for counterfactual explanations designed to support consistent implementation and evaluation. CEL includes 18 datasets of varying size and complexity and provides implementations or reimplementations of 14 widely used counterfactual methods. Using this standardized setup, we conduct a comprehensive quantitative comparison across a variety of methods on datasets that differ in size, number, and types of attributes. The evaluation protocol incorporates multiple complementary metrics capturing validity, coverage, sparsity, proximity, and distributional plausibility, including density- and outlier-based measures to assess the realism of generated counterfactuals. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive benchmark that systematically evaluates recent counterfactual explanation methods within a unified and reproducible framework. While prior libraries and benchmarking efforts exist in the literature, many are outdated, limited in scope, or lack consistent evaluation protocols. The proposed benchmark aims to improve reproducibility, enable fair comparison, and establish a workbench for the development of future counterfactual explanation methods.
| Comments: | 16 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for presentation at the XKDD and Beyond Workshop (non-archival) |
| Subjects: | Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2607.22045 [cs.LG] |
| (or arXiv:2607.22045v1 [cs.LG] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.22045
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
Access Paper:
- View PDF
- HTML (experimental)
- TeX Source
References & Citations
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
Demos
Recommenders and Search Tools
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
More from arXiv — Machine Learning
-
LoKiFormer: Locality-aware Attention with Decoupled Knowledge Memory for Efficient Large Language Model Pretraining
Aug 14
-
Which Site, and When: A Free-Satellite-Data Test of Himalayan Glacial Lake Bursts, Landslides, and Ice Floods
Aug 14
-
MARCH: Scaling Recurrent Memory with Content-Routed State Anchors
Aug 14
-
Multi-AUV Ad-hoc network-based Target Tracking: A Value Gradient Guidance Multi-Agent Diffusion Reinforcement Learning Approach
Aug 14
Discussion (0)
Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.
Sign in →No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.