U-CECE: A Universal Multi-Resolution Framework for Conceptual Counterfactual Explanations

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Dimitriou, Angeliki, Chaidos, Nikolaos, Lymperaiou, Maria, Filandrianos, Giorgos, Stamou, Giorgos
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Dimitriou, Angeliki
Chaidos, Nikolaos
Lymperaiou, Maria
Filandrianos, Giorgos
Stamou, Giorgos
author_facet Dimitriou, Angeliki
Chaidos, Nikolaos
Lymperaiou, Maria
Filandrianos, Giorgos
Stamou, Giorgos
contents As AI models grow more complex, explainability is essential for building trust, yet concept-based counterfactual methods still face a trade-off between expressivity and efficiency. Representing underlying concepts as atomic sets is fast but misses relational context, whereas full graph representations are more faithful but require solving the NP-hard Graph Edit Distance (GED) problem. We propose U-CECE, a unified, model-agnostic multi-resolution framework for conceptual counterfactual explanations that adapts to data regime and compute budget. U-CECE spans three levels of expressivity: atomic concepts for broad explanations, relational sets-of-sets for simple interactions, and structural graphs for full semantic structure. At the structural level, both a precision-oriented transductive mode based on supervised Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and a scalable inductive mode based on unsupervised graph autoencoders (GAEs) are supported. Experiments on the structurally divergent CUB and Visual Genome datasets characterize the efficiency-expressivity trade-off across levels, while human surveys and LVLM-based evaluation show that the retrieved structural counterfactuals are semantically equivalent to, and often preferred over, exact GED-based ground-truth explanations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_08295
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle U-CECE: A Universal Multi-Resolution Framework for Conceptual Counterfactual Explanations
Dimitriou, Angeliki
Chaidos, Nikolaos
Lymperaiou, Maria
Filandrianos, Giorgos
Stamou, Giorgos
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
As AI models grow more complex, explainability is essential for building trust, yet concept-based counterfactual methods still face a trade-off between expressivity and efficiency. Representing underlying concepts as atomic sets is fast but misses relational context, whereas full graph representations are more faithful but require solving the NP-hard Graph Edit Distance (GED) problem. We propose U-CECE, a unified, model-agnostic multi-resolution framework for conceptual counterfactual explanations that adapts to data regime and compute budget. U-CECE spans three levels of expressivity: atomic concepts for broad explanations, relational sets-of-sets for simple interactions, and structural graphs for full semantic structure. At the structural level, both a precision-oriented transductive mode based on supervised Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and a scalable inductive mode based on unsupervised graph autoencoders (GAEs) are supported. Experiments on the structurally divergent CUB and Visual Genome datasets characterize the efficiency-expressivity trade-off across levels, while human surveys and LVLM-based evaluation show that the retrieved structural counterfactuals are semantically equivalent to, and often preferred over, exact GED-based ground-truth explanations.
title U-CECE: A Universal Multi-Resolution Framework for Conceptual Counterfactual Explanations
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08295