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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2026
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01425 |
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| _version_ | 1866915974249185280 |
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| author | Cohen, Aloni Zhang, Chenhao |
| author_facet | Cohen, Aloni Zhang, Chenhao |
| contents | Generative AI disrupts the practice of giving credit to work that came before. Ideally, a generative model would give credit to any work on which its output depends in a significant way. \emph{Counterfactual credit attribution} (CCA) is a technical condition formalizing this goal--a relaxation of differential privacy--recently introduced by Livni, Moran, Nissim, and Pabbaraju [2024] who studied it in the PAC learning setting.
We initiate the study of CCA generative models. Specifically, we consider autoregressive models giving credit to a deployment-time dataset (e.g., a RAG database). We uncover barriers to two natural approaches to CCA autoregressive models. First, we show that imposing CCA on the underlying next-token predictor does not guarantee that the model is CCA: CCA does not compose autoregressively (unlike DP). Second, we consider a different approach to building CCA models which we call \emph{retrofitting}. Retrofitting takes a model that does not attribute credit, and adds credit onto it. We prove a lower bound for CCA retrofitting under a weak optimality requirement. Given black-box access to the starting model, retrofitting requires query complexity exponential in the length of the model's outputs. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_01425 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Barriers to Counterfactual Credit Attribution for Autoregressive Models Cohen, Aloni Zhang, Chenhao Machine Learning Generative AI disrupts the practice of giving credit to work that came before. Ideally, a generative model would give credit to any work on which its output depends in a significant way. \emph{Counterfactual credit attribution} (CCA) is a technical condition formalizing this goal--a relaxation of differential privacy--recently introduced by Livni, Moran, Nissim, and Pabbaraju [2024] who studied it in the PAC learning setting. We initiate the study of CCA generative models. Specifically, we consider autoregressive models giving credit to a deployment-time dataset (e.g., a RAG database). We uncover barriers to two natural approaches to CCA autoregressive models. First, we show that imposing CCA on the underlying next-token predictor does not guarantee that the model is CCA: CCA does not compose autoregressively (unlike DP). Second, we consider a different approach to building CCA models which we call \emph{retrofitting}. Retrofitting takes a model that does not attribute credit, and adds credit onto it. We prove a lower bound for CCA retrofitting under a weak optimality requirement. Given black-box access to the starting model, retrofitting requires query complexity exponential in the length of the model's outputs. |
| title | Barriers to Counterfactual Credit Attribution for Autoregressive Models |
| topic | Machine Learning |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.01425 |