From Visual Explanations to Counterfactual Explanations with Latent Diffusion (2504.09202v1)

Abstract: Visual counterfactual explanations are ideal hypothetical images that change the decision-making of the classifier with high confidence toward the desired class while remaining visually plausible and close to the initial image. In this paper, we propose a new approach to tackle two key challenges in recent prominent works: i) determining which specific counterfactual features are crucial for distinguishing the "concept" of the target class from the original class, and ii) supplying valuable explanations for the non-robust classifier without relying on the support of an adversarially robust model. Our method identifies the essential region for modification through algorithms that provide visual explanations, and then our framework generates realistic counterfactual explanations by combining adversarial attacks based on pruning the adversarial gradient of the target classifier and the latent diffusion model. The proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art results on various evaluation criteria on ImageNet and CelebA-HQ datasets. In general, our method can be applied to arbitrary classifiers, highlight the strong association between visual and counterfactual explanations, make semantically meaningful changes from the target classifier, and provide observers with subtle counterfactual images.