# Attention Is Not the Only Choice: Counterfactual Reasoning for Path-Based Explainable Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05744 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05744/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jan 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Toward Structure Fairness in Dynamic Graph Embedding: A Trend-aware Dual Debiasing Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13201/) (2024)
- [All in One: Multi-Task Prompting for Graph Neural Networks (Extended Abstract)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07040/) (2024)
- [MSCI: Addressing CLIP's Inherent Limitations for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10289/) (2025)
- [Interpretable High-order Knowledge Graph Neural Network for Predicting Synthetic Lethality in Human Cancers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06052/) (2025)
- [A Scenario-Oriented Survey of Federated Recommender Systems: Techniques, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19620/) (2025)
- [Diversity Recommendation via Causal Deconfounding of Co-purchase Relations and Counterfactual Exposure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17733/) (2025)
- [Explaining Synergistic Effects in Social Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18151/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Compared with only pursuing recommendation accuracy, the explainability of a recommendation model has drawn more attention in recent years. Many graph-based recommendations resort to informative paths with the attention mechanism for the explanation. Unfortunately, these attention weights are intentionally designed for model accuracy but not explainability. Recently, some researchers have started to question attention-based explainability because the attention weights are unstable for different reproductions, and they may not always align with human intuition. Inspired by the counterfactual reasoning from causality learning theory, we propose a novel explainable framework targeting path-based recommendations, wherein the explainable weights of paths are learned to replace attention weights. Specifically, we design two counterfactual reasoning algorithms from both path representation and path topological structure perspectives. Moreover, unlike traditional case studies, we also propose a package of explainability evaluation solutions with both qualitative and quantitative methods. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets, the results of which further demonstrate the effectiveness and reliability of our method.