Dianer Yu

Xiangmeng Wang, Qian Li, Dianer Yu et al.

Counterfactual explanations interpret the recommendation mechanism via exploring how minimal alterations on items or users affect the recommendation decisions. Existing counterfactual explainable approaches face huge search space and their explanations are either action-based (e.g., user click) or aspect-based (i.e., item description). We believe item attribute-based explanations are more intuitive and persuadable for users since they explain by fine-grained item demographic features (e.g., brand). Moreover, counterfactual explanation could enhance recommendations by filtering out negative items. In this work, we propose a novel Counterfactual Explainable Recommendation (CERec) to generate item attribute-based counterfactual explanations meanwhile to boost recommendation performance. Our CERec optimizes an explanation policy upon uniformly searching candidate counterfactuals within a reinforcement learning environment. We reduce the huge search space with an adaptive path sampler by using rich context information of a given knowledge graph. We also deploy the explanation policy to a recommendation model to enhance the recommendation. Extensive explainability and recommendation evaluations demonstrate CERec's ability to provide explanations consistent with user preferences and maintain improved recommendations. We release our code at https://github.com/Chrystalii/CERec.

Xiangmeng Wang, Qian Li, Dianer Yu et al.

Traditional recommendation models trained on observational interaction data have generated large impacts in a wide range of applications, it faces bias problems that cover users' true intent and thus deteriorate the recommendation effectiveness. Existing methods tracks this problem as eliminating bias for the robust recommendation, e.g., by re-weighting training samples or learning disentangled representation. The disentangled representation methods as the state-of-the-art eliminate bias through revealing cause-effect of the bias generation. However, how to design the semantics-aware and unbiased representation for users true intents is largely unexplored. To bridge the gap, we are the first to propose an unbiased and semantics-aware disentanglement learning called CaDSI (Causal Disentanglement for Semantics-Aware Intent Learning) from a causal perspective. Particularly, CaDSI explicitly models the causal relations underlying recommendation task, and thus produces semantics-aware representations via disentangling users true intents aware of specific item context. Moreover, the causal intervention mechanism is designed to eliminate confounding bias stemmed from context information, which further to align the semantics-aware representation with users true intent. Extensive experiments and case studies both validate the robustness and interpretability of our proposed model.