User-Controllable Recommendation via Counterfactual Retrospective and
  Prospective Explanations
Juntao Tan Yingqiang Ge Yan Zhu Yinglong Xia Jiebo Luo Jianchao Ji Yongfeng Zhang
Modern recommender systems utilize users' historical behaviors to generate
personalized recommendations. However, these systems often lack user
controllability, leading to diminished user satisfaction and trust in the
systems. Acknowledging the recent advancements in explainable recommender
systems that enhance users' understanding of recommendation mechanisms, we
propose leveraging these advancements to improve user controllability. In this
paper, we present a user-controllable recommender system that seamlessly
integrates explainability and controllability within a unified framework. By
providing both retrospective and prospective explanations through
counterfactual reasoning, users can customize their control over the system by
interacting with these explanations.
  Furthermore, we introduce and assess two attributes of controllability in
recommendation systems: the complexity of controllability and the accuracy of
controllability. Experimental evaluations on MovieLens and Yelp datasets
substantiate the effectiveness of our proposed framework. Additionally, our
experiments demonstrate that offering users control options can potentially
enhance recommendation accuracy in the future. Source code and data are
available at \url{https://github.com/chrisjtan/ucr}.