Diffusion-based Visual Counterfactual Explanations -- Towards Systematic
  Quantitative Evaluation
Philipp Vaeth Alexander M. Fruehwald Benjamin Paassen Magda Gregorova
Latest methods for visual counterfactual explanations (VCE) harness the power
of deep generative models to synthesize new examples of high-dimensional images
of impressive quality. However, it is currently difficult to compare the
performance of these VCE methods as the evaluation procedures largely vary and
often boil down to visual inspection of individual examples and small scale
user studies. In this work, we propose a framework for systematic, quantitative
evaluation of the VCE methods and a minimal set of metrics to be used. We use
this framework to explore the effects of certain crucial design choices in the
latest diffusion-based generative models for VCEs of natural image
classification (ImageNet). We conduct a battery of ablation-like experiments,
generating thousands of VCEs for a suite of classifiers of various complexity,
accuracy and robustness. Our findings suggest multiple directions for future
advancements and improvements of VCE methods. By sharing our methodology and
our approach to tackle the computational challenges of such a study on a
limited hardware setup (including the complete code base), we offer a valuable
guidance for researchers in the field fostering consistency and transparency in
the assessment of counterfactual explanations.