Explanation fidelity, which measures how accurately an explanation reflects a model’s true reasoning, remains critically underexplored in recommender systems. We introduce SPINRec (Stochastic Path Integration for Neural Recommender Explanations), a model-agnostic approach that adapts path-integration techniques to the sparse and implicit nature of recommendation data. To overcome the limitations of prior methods, SPINRec employs stochastic baseline sampling: instead of integrating from a fixed or unrealistic baseline, it samples multiple plausible user profiles from the empirical data distribution and selects the most faithful attribution path. This design captures the influence of both observed and unobserved interactions, yielding more stable and personalized explanations. We conduct the most comprehensive fidelity evaluation to date across three models (MF, VAE, NCF), three datasets (ML1M, Yahoo! Music, Pinterest), and a suite of counterfactual metrics, including AUC-based perturbation curves and fixed-length diagnostics. SPINRec consistently outperforms all baselines, establishing a new benchmark for faithful explainability in recommendation.

Recommender systems have become integral to many online services, leveraging user data to provide personalized recommendations. However, as these systems grow in complexity, understanding the rationale behind their recommendations becomes increasingly difficult. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has emerged as a crucial field addressing this challenge, particularly in ensuring transparency and trustworthiness in automated decision-making processes. In this article, we introduce Learning to eXplain Recommendations (LXR) , a scalable, model-agnostic framework designed to generate counterfactually correct explanations for recommender systems. LXR generates explanations for recommendations produced by any differentiable recommender system. By leveraging both factual and counterfactual loss terms, LXR offers robust, accurate, and computationally efficient explanations that reflect the model’s internal decision-making process. A key feature of LXR is its focus on the factual correctness of explanations through counterfactual reasoning, bridging the gap between plausible and accurate explanations. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on exhaustive perturbations of user data, LXR uses a self-supervised learning method to generate explanations efficiently, without sacrificing accuracy. LXR operates in two stages: a pre-training step and a novel Inference-Time Fine-tuning (ITF) step that refines explanations at the individual recommendation level, significantly improving accuracy with minimal computational overhead. Additionally, LXR is applied to hybrid recommender models incorporating demographic data, demonstrating its versatility across real-world scenarios. Finally, we also showcase LXR’s ability to explain recommendations at various ranks within a user’s recommendation list. As a secondary contribution, we introduce several novel evaluation metrics, inspired by saliency maps from computer vision, to rigorously assess the counterfactual correctness of explanations in recommender systems. Our results demonstrate that LXR sets a new benchmark for explainability, providing accurate, transparent, and interpretable explanations. The code is available on our GitHub repository: https://github.com/DeltaLabTLV/LXR_ .

Counterfactual evaluation provides a promising framework for assessing explanation fidelity in recommender systems, but perturbation metrics adapted from computer vision suffer three key limitations: (1) they conflate explaining and contradictory features, (2) they average over entire user histories instead of prioritizing concise, high-impact explanations, and (3) they use fixed-percentage perturbations, leading to inconsistencies across users.We introduce refined counterfactual metrics that focus on the most relevant explaining features, exclude contradictory elements, and assess fidelity at a fixed explanation length, ensuring a more consistent and interpretable evaluation.Our code is at: https:// github.com/DeltaLabTLV/FidelityMetrics4XRec