Mitigating Popularity Bias in Counterfactual Explanations using Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hasami, Arjan, Mansoury, Masoud
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Hasami, Arjan
Mansoury, Masoud
author_facet Hasami, Arjan
Mansoury, Masoud
contents Counterfactual explanations (CFEs) offer a tangible and actionable way to explain recommendations by showing users a "what-if" scenario that demonstrates how small changes in their history would alter the system's output. However, existing CFE methods are susceptible to bias, generating explanations that might misalign with the user's actual preferences. In this paper, we propose a pre-processing step that leverages large language models to filter out-of-character history items before generating an explanation. In experiments on two public datasets, we focus on popularity bias and apply our approach to ACCENT, a neural CFE framework. We find that it creates counterfactuals that are more closely aligned with each user's popularity preferences than ACCENT alone.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_08946
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mitigating Popularity Bias in Counterfactual Explanations using Large Language Models
Hasami, Arjan
Mansoury, Masoud
Information Retrieval
Counterfactual explanations (CFEs) offer a tangible and actionable way to explain recommendations by showing users a "what-if" scenario that demonstrates how small changes in their history would alter the system's output. However, existing CFE methods are susceptible to bias, generating explanations that might misalign with the user's actual preferences. In this paper, we propose a pre-processing step that leverages large language models to filter out-of-character history items before generating an explanation. In experiments on two public datasets, we focus on popularity bias and apply our approach to ACCENT, a neural CFE framework. We find that it creates counterfactuals that are more closely aligned with each user's popularity preferences than ACCENT alone.
title Mitigating Popularity Bias in Counterfactual Explanations using Large Language Models
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08946