A Generalized-Bayes Perspective on Counterfactual Explanations: Posterior-Based Decision-Making and Evaluation

arXiv:2607.29077v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Counterfactual explanations (CEs) enhance the interpretability of machine learning models by identifying the smallest change to an input required to obtain a desired output. Although CEs are conventionally formulated as a distance-minimization problem, the theoretical basis of this formulation has received limited attention. We show that a distance-minimization-based CE is mathematically equivalent to the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimate of a Gi...