A Counterfactual Framework for Learning and Evaluating Explanations for Recommender Systems

In the field of recommender systems, explainability remains a pivotal yet challenging aspect. To address this, we introduce the Learning to eXplain Recommendations (LXR) framework, a post-hoc, model-agnostic approach designed for providing counterfactual explanations. LXR is compatible with any differentiable recommender algorithm and scores the relevance of user data in relation to recommended items. A distinctive feature of LXR is its use of novel self-supervised counterfactual loss terms, which effectively highlight the most influential user data responsible for a specific recommended item. Additionally, we propose several innovative counterfactual evaluation metrics specifically tailored for assessing the quality of explanations in recommender systems. Our code is available on our GitHub repository: https://github.com/DeltaLabTLV/LXR.