GLANCE: Global Actions in a Nutshell for Counterfactual Explainability
Pith reviewed 2026-05-24 00:56 UTC · model grok-4.3
The pith
GLANCE uses a novel agglomerative approach on feature and action spaces to generate global counterfactual explanations that balance effectiveness, cost, and number of actions.
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
Core claim
GLANCE is a versatile algorithm that employs a novel agglomerative approach, jointly considering both the feature space and the space of counterfactual actions, thereby accounting for the distribution of points in a way that aligns with the model's structure. This design enables the careful balancing of the trade-offs among effectiveness, cost, and the number of actions, with the size objective functioning as a tunable parameter. Extensive experiments show it achieves greater robustness and performance than existing methods across datasets and models.
What carries the argument
agglomerative approach that jointly considers the feature space and the space of counterfactual actions
Load-bearing premise
Jointly considering both the feature space and the counterfactual-action space will account for the distribution of points in a way that aligns with the model's structure and produces the desired trade-off balance.
What would settle it
Comparative experiments on standard datasets and models where GLANCE does not achieve higher effectiveness at comparable or lower cost with fewer actions than baselines.
Figures
read the original abstract
The widespread deployment of machine learning systems in critical real-world decision-making applications has highlighted the urgent need for counterfactual explainability methods that operate effectively. Global counterfactual explanations, expressed as actions to offer recourse, aim to provide succinct explanations and insights applicable to large population subgroups. High effectiveness, measured by the fraction of the population that is provided recourse, ensures that the actions benefit as many individuals as possible. Keeping the cost of actions low ensures the proposed recourse actions remain practical and actionable. Limiting the number of actions that provide global counterfactuals is essential to maximizing interpretability. The primary challenge, therefore, is to balance these trade-offs--maximizing effectiveness, minimizing cost, while maintaining a small number of actions. We introduce $\texttt{GLANCE}$, a versatile and adaptive algorithm that employs a novel agglomerative approach, jointly considering both the feature space and the space of counterfactual actions, thereby accounting for the distribution of points in a way that aligns with the model's structure. This design enables the careful balancing of the trade-offs among the three key objectives, with the size objective functioning as a tunable parameter to keep the actions few and easy to interpret. Our extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that $\texttt{GLANCE}$ consistently shows greater robustness and performance compared to existing methods across various datasets and models.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper introduces GLANCE, a versatile and adaptive algorithm for global counterfactual explanations that employs a novel agglomerative approach jointly considering the feature space and the space of counterfactual actions. This design accounts for the distribution of points in a model-aligned way to balance three objectives: maximizing effectiveness (fraction of the population provided recourse), minimizing action cost, and limiting the number of actions (with size as a tunable parameter for interpretability). Extensive experiments are claimed to show greater robustness and performance compared to existing methods across various datasets and models.
Significance. If the empirical claims hold, the work could contribute a practical method for generating succinct, actionable global recourse in deployed ML systems. The joint-space agglomerative construction is presented as enabling better trade-off control than prior approaches; reproducible code or parameter-free derivations are not mentioned.
minor comments (2)
- [Abstract] The abstract states that the method 'accounts for the distribution of points in a way that aligns with the model's structure,' but does not specify the precise mechanism (e.g., distance metric, linkage criterion, or how model predictions enter the joint space); this should be clarified with pseudocode or equations in §3 or §4.
- [Abstract] The claim of 'consistently shows greater robustness and performance' requires explicit definition of the three metrics and the statistical tests used; tables comparing effectiveness, cost, and action count against baselines should include standard deviations or p-values.
Simulated Author's Rebuttal
We thank the referee for their review and for recognizing the potential of GLANCE's joint-space agglomerative approach. We address the concerns about reproducibility and empirical validation below.
read point-by-point responses
-
Referee: reproducible code or parameter-free derivations are not mentioned.
Authors: We agree that reproducibility is important. The revised manuscript will include a public code repository link and a dedicated subsection detailing hyperparameter selection, default values, and sensitivity analysis to improve accessibility and reproducibility. revision: yes
-
Referee: If the empirical claims hold, the work could contribute a practical method for generating succinct, actionable global recourse.
Authors: Sections 4 and 5 present results across multiple datasets and models showing consistent improvements in the effectiveness-cost-number trade-off. We maintain that the reported experiments support the claims; additional ablation studies can be added if the referee identifies specific gaps. revision: no
Circularity Check
No significant circularity
full rationale
The paper introduces GLANCE as a new agglomerative algorithm operating on the joint feature and action space. No equations, fitted parameters, or self-citations appear in the abstract or description that reduce any claimed result to its own inputs by construction. The central claim is an empirical statement of improved trade-off balance, which rests on the independent algorithmic procedure rather than any definitional loop or renamed fit. This is the common case of a self-contained algorithmic contribution.
Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger
invented entities (1)
-
GLANCE algorithm
no independent evidence
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
-
[1]
Machine bias.Ethics of Data and Analytics, pages 254–264, 5 2016
Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu, and Lauren Kirchner. Machine bias.Ethics of Data and Analytics, pages 254–264, 5 2016. doi: 10.1201/ 9781003278290-37
work page 2016
-
[2]
Barry Becker and Ronny Kohavi. Adult. UCI Machine Learning Reposi- tory, 1996. DOI: https://doi.org/10.24432/C5XW20
-
[3]
Springer Science & Business Media, 2008
J¨ urgen Branke.Multiobjective optimization: Interactive and evolutionary approaches, volume 5252. Springer Science & Business Media, 2008
work page 2008
-
[4]
HELOC Applicant Risk Performance Evaluation by Topological Hierarchical Decomposition
Kyle Brown, Derek Doran, Ryan Kramer, and Brad Reynolds. HELOC applicant risk performance evaluation by topological hierarchical decom- position.CoRR, abs/1811.10658, 2018. URLhttp://arxiv.org/abs/ 1811.10658
work page internal anchor Pith review Pith/arXiv arXiv 2018
-
[5]
Dieter Brughmans, Pieter Leyman, and David Martens. Nice: an algo- rithm for nearest instance counterfactual explanations.Data mining and knowledge discovery, 38(5):2665–2703, 2024
work page 2024
-
[6]
Counterfactual explanations for oblique decision trees: Exact, efficient algorithms
Miguel ´A Carreira-Perpi˜ n´ an and Suryabhan Singh Hada. Counterfactual explanations for oblique decision trees: Exact, efficient algorithms. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, volume 35, pages 6903–6911. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2021
work page 2021
-
[7]
Emilio Carrizosa, Jasone Ram´ ırez-Ayerbe, and Dolores Romero Morales. Generating collective counterfactual explanations in score-based classifica- tion via mathematical optimization.Expert Systems with Applications, 238: 121954, 2024
work page 2024
-
[8]
Emilio Carrizosa, Jasone Ram´ ırez-Ayerbe, and Dolores Romero Morales. Mathematical optimization modelling for group counterfactual explana- tions.European Journal of Operational Research, 2024. 15
work page 2024
-
[9]
Equi-explanation maps: concise and informative global summary explanations
Tanya Chowdhury, Razieh Rahimi, and James Allan. Equi-explanation maps: concise and informative global summary explanations. InProceed- ings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Trans- parency, pages 464–472, 2022
work page 2022
-
[10]
Multi-objective counterfactual explanations
Susanne Dandl, Christoph Molnar, Martin Binder, and Bernd Bischl. Multi-objective counterfactual explanations. InInternational conference on parallel problem solving from nature, pages 448–469. Springer, 2020
work page 2020
-
[11]
Instance-based counter- factual explanations for time series classification
Eoin Delaney, Derek Greene, and Mark T Keane. Instance-based counter- factual explanations for time series classification. InInternational confer- ence on case-based reasoning, pages 32–47. Springer, 2021
work page 2021
-
[12]
Uci machine learning repository
Dheeru Dua and C Graff. Uci machine learning repository. university of california, school of information and computer science, irvine, ca (2019), 2019
work page 2019
-
[13]
U. Feige. A threshold of lnnfor approximating set cover.Journal of the ACM, 45(4):634–652, 1998
work page 1998
-
[14]
Peter C Fishburn and William V Gehrlein. Borda’s rule, positional voting, and condorcet’s simple majority principle.Public Choice, pages 79–88, 1976
work page 1976
-
[15]
Facegroup: Feasible and actionable counterfactual explana- tions for group fairness
Christos Fragkathoulas, Vasiliki Papanikou, Evaggelia Pitoura, and Evi- maria Terzi. Facegroup: Feasible and actionable counterfactual explana- tions for group fairness. InJoint European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases, pages 41–59. Springer, 2025
work page 2025
-
[16]
M.R. Garey and D.S. Johnson.Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness. W. H. Freeman, 1979. ISBN 0-7167-1044- 7
work page 1979
-
[17]
Riccardo Guidotti. Counterfactual explanations and how to find them: lit- erature review and benchmarking.Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 38(5):2770–2824, 2024
work page 2024
-
[18]
Global counterfactual explainer for graph neural networks
Zexi Huang, Mert Kosan, Sourav Medya, Sayan Ranu, and Ambuj Singh. Global counterfactual explainer for graph neural networks. InProceedings of the Sixteenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, pages 141–149, 2023
work page 2023
-
[19]
Kentaro Kanamori, Takuya Takagi, Ken Kobayashi, and Yuichi Ike. Coun- terfactual explanation trees: Transparent and consistent actionable re- course with decision trees. InInternational Conference on Artificial In- telligence and Statistics, pages 1846–1870. PMLR, 2022
work page 2022
-
[20]
Amir-Hossein Karimi, Gilles Barthe, Bernhard Sch¨ olkopf, and Isabel Valera. A survey of algorithmic recourse: definitions, formulations, so- lutions, and prospects.arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.04050, 2020. 16
-
[21]
Algorithmic recourse: from counterfactual explanations to interventions
Amir-Hossein Karimi, Bernhard Sch¨ olkopf, and Isabel Valera. Algorithmic recourse: from counterfactual explanations to interventions. InProceedings of the 2021 ACM conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency, pages 353–362, 2021
work page 2021
-
[22]
Loukas Kavouras, Konstantinos Tsopelas, Giorgos Giannopoulos, Dimitris Sacharidis, Eleni Psaroudaki, Nikolaos Theologitis, Dimitrios Rontogiannis, Dimitris Fotakis, and Ioannis Emiris. Fairness aware counterfactuals for subgroups.Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 36:58246– 58276, 2023
work page 2023
-
[23]
Jaehoon Koo, Diego Klabjan, and Jean Utke. An inverse classification framework with limited budget and maximum number of perturbed sam- ples.Expert Systems with Applications, 212:118761, 2023. ISSN 0957-
work page 2023
-
[24]
URLhttps: //www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0957417422017791
doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2022.118761. URLhttps: //www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0957417422017791
-
[25]
Global counterfac- tual explanations: Investigations, implementations and improvements
Dan Ley, Saumitra Mishra, and Daniele Magazzeni. Global counterfac- tual explanations: Investigations, implementations and improvements. In ICLR Workshop on Privacy, Accountability, Interpretability, Robustness, Reasoning on Structured Data, 2022
work page 2022
-
[26]
GLOBE-CE: A trans- lation based approach for global counterfactual explanations
Dan Ley, Saumitra Mishra, and Daniele Magazzeni. GLOBE-CE: A trans- lation based approach for global counterfactual explanations. In Andreas Krause, Emma Brunskill, Kyunghyun Cho, Barbara Engelhardt, Sivan Sabato, and Jonathan Scarlett, editors,Proceedings of the 40th Interna- tional Conference on Machine Learning, volume 202 ofProceedings of Ma- chine Le...
work page 2023
-
[27]
Tim Miller. Explanation in artificial intelligence: Insights from the social sciences.Artificial intelligence, 267:1–38, 2019
work page 2019
-
[28]
Explaining ma- chine learning classifiers through diverse counterfactual explanations
Ramaravind K Mothilal, Amit Sharma, and Chenhao Tan. Explaining ma- chine learning classifiers through diverse counterfactual explanations. In Proceedings of the 2020 conference on fairness, accountability, and trans- parency, pages 607–617, 2020
work page 2020
-
[29]
Beyond individualized re- course: Interpretable and interactive summaries of actionable recourses
Kaivalya Rawal and Himabindu Lakkaraju. Beyond individualized re- course: Interpretable and interactive summaries of actionable recourses. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 33:12187–12198, 2020
work page 2020
-
[30]
Shubham Sharma, Jette Henderson, and Joydeep Ghosh. CERTIFAI: coun- terfactual explanations for robustness, transparency, interpretability, and fairness of artificial intelligence models.CoRR, abs/1905.07857, 2019. URL http://arxiv.org/abs/1905.07857
-
[31]
Barry Smyth and Mark T Keane. Good counterfactuals and where to find them: A case-based technique for generating counterfactuals for explainable 17 ai (xai).ICCBR 2020: Case-Based Reasoning Research and Development, 2020
work page 2020
-
[32]
Counterfactual explanations with probabilistic guarantees on their robustness to model change
Ignacy Stepka, Jerzy Stefanowski, and Mateusz Lango. Counterfactual explanations with probabilistic guarantees on their robustness to model change. InProceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pages 1277–1288. ACM, 2025. doi: 10.1145/ 3690624.3709300. URLhttps://doi.org/10.1145/3690624.3709300
-
[33]
Actionable recourse in linear classification
Berk Ustun, Alexander Spangher, and Yang Liu. Actionable recourse in linear classification. InProceedings of the conference on fairness, account- ability, and transparency, pages 10–19, 2019
work page 2019
-
[34]
Sahil Verma, Varich Boonsanong, Minh Hoang, Keegan Hines, John Dick- erson, and Chirag Shah. Counterfactual explanations and algorithmic re- courses for machine learning: A review.ACM Computing Surveys, 56(12): 1–42, 2024
work page 2024
-
[35]
Counterfactual explanations without opening the black box: Automated decisions and the gdpr.Harv
Sandra Wachter, Brent Mittelstadt, and Chris Russell. Counterfactual explanations without opening the black box: Automated decisions and the gdpr.Harv. JL & Tech., 31:841, 2017
work page 2017
- [36]
-
[37]
Ivy Yeh and Che-Hui Lien. The comparisons of data mining techniques for the predictive accuracy of probability of default of credit card clients. Expert Systems with Applications, 36:2473–2480, 03 2009. doi: 10.1016/j. eswa.2007.12.020. 18 Technical Appendix The appendix is organized as follows: •Appendix A includes the proof of Theorem 2. •Appendix B pro...
work page doi:10.1016/j 2009
-
[38]
We focus on modifying only the topk f most important features (using permutation feature importance), set to 3 in all experiments
-
[39]
For categorical features, only the topk c most frequent categories among unaffected individuals are considered replacement candidates (set to 10 for all experiments)
-
[40]
lowest cost above a certain effectiveness threshold
We also introduce vectorization in certain operations, improving compu- tational efficiency over DiCE’s implementation. Nearest NeighborsThis method is implemented by storing all unaffected individuals in memory. When queried to providekcounterfactuals for an af- fected individual, it retrieves theknearest neighbors from the set of unaffected instances ba...
work page 1910
-
[41]
Assess how participants weigh trade-offs between effectiveness, average recourse cost, and size
-
[42]
Validate our evaluation metrics, i.e., solution practicality and robustness (investigate how variance in recourse cost and effectiveness affects the participants’ decisions)
-
[43]
Assess how participants rankGLANCErelative to baselines in non-dominated solution scenarios. We recruited 55 participants from six countries, comprising (a) PhD students and (b) researchers from various machine learning domains. N.1 Part 1: Algorithm Ranking Task In the first part of the study, participants were asked to rank Global Counterfac- tual Expla...
-
[44]
How participants respond to trade-offs between effectiveness and average recourse cost, assuming low variance
-
[45]
Whether participants prioritize robustness (i.e., low variance)
-
[46]
45 N.2.1 Design Each participant answered five pairwise comparison questions:
Whether dominance is respected or overridden by subjective considera- tions. 45 N.2.1 Design Each participant answered five pairwise comparison questions:
-
[47]
One involved an impractical baseline solution (e.g., DNN/Adult :Fast AresvsGLANCE)
-
[48]
One involved a case whereGLANCEwas formally dominated, demonstrat- ing lower effectiveness and higher cost (DNN/HELOC:dGLOBE-CEvs. GLANCE)
-
[49]
Participants chose one preferred algorithm per question and selected a justifi- cation from the list
Three involved non-dominated algorithm pairs, includingGLANCEand var- ious baselines (e.g., DNN/German Credit:CETvsGLANCE). Participants chose one preferred algorithm per question and selected a justifi- cation from the list. Free-text feedback was also collected to better understand reasoning. N.2.2 Key Findings
-
[50]
In the comparison with an impractical solution, 100% of the participants preferredGLANCE. Of these, 77.8% stated that their decision stemmed from the low effectiveness of the baseline, not justGLANCE’s strength. The remaining 22.2% stated that they simply prioritized effectiveness over cost. These results validate the practicality criterion used in our ex...
-
[51]
This suggests that robust- ness considerations can override formal dominance in human evaluation
In the dominated comparison (DNN/HELOC), wheredGLOBE-CEoutper- formedGLANCEin both cost and effectiveness, 74.5% of participants still preferredGLANCE, citing its lower variance. This suggests that robust- ness considerations can override formal dominance in human evaluation. The 74.5% preference forGLANCE(vs. 25.5% for baseline method) was statistically ...
-
[52]
In the remaining three non-dominated comparisons, an average of 71.5% of participants preferredGLANCEover baseline methods. Across all non- dominated comparisons, 14.5% of participants on average selected the “smaller variance” option as their main justification for their decisions, and 27.8% of participants explicitly stated in free text feedback that ro...
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.