Beyond Trivial Counterfactual Generations with Diverse Valuable Explanations

Explainability of machine learning models has gained considerable attention within our research community given the importance of deploying more reliable machine-learning systems. Explanability can also be helpful for model debugging. In computer vision applications, most methods explain models by displaying the regions in the input image that they focus on for their prediction, but it is difficult to improve models based on these explanations since they do not indicate why the model fail. Counterfactual methods, on the other hand, indicate how to perturb the input to change the model prediction, providing details about the model's decision-making. Unfortunately, current counterfactual methods make ambiguous interpretations as they combine multiple biases of the model and the data in a single counterfactual interpretation of the model's decision. Moreover, these methods tend to generate trivial counterfactuals about the model's decision, as they often suggest to exaggerate or remove the presence of the attribute being classified. Trivial counterfactuals are usually not valuable, since the information they provide is often already known to the system's designer. In this work, we propose a counterfactual method that learns a perturbation in a disentangled latent space that is constrained using a diversity-enforcing loss to uncover multiple valuable explanations about the model's prediction. Further, we introduce a mechanism to prevent the model from producing trivial explanations. Experiments on CelebA and Synbols demonstrate that our model improves the success rate of producing high-quality valuable explanations when compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. We will make the code public.