Mitigating Popularity Bias in Counterfactual Explanations using Large Language Models

Abstract

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.