Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37 (NeurIPS 2024) Main Conference Track
Guang-Yuan Hao, Jiji Zhang, Biwei Huang, Hao Wang, Kun Zhang
Counterfactual reasoning is pivotal in human cognition and especially important for providing explanations and making decisions. While Judea Pearl's influential approach is theoretically elegant, its generation of a counterfactual scenario often requires too much deviation from the observed scenarios to be feasible, as we show using simple examples. To mitigate this difficulty, we propose a framework of natural counterfactuals and a method for generating counterfactuals that are more feasible with respect to the actual data distribution. Our methodology incorporates a certain amount of backtracking when needed, allowing changes in causally preceding variables to minimize deviations from realistic scenarios. Specifically, we introduce a novel optimization framework that permits but also controls the extent of backtracking with a "naturalness'' criterion. Empirical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/GuangyuanHao/natural_counterfactuals.