VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Khac-Manh Thai
dblp:435/7229
· DBLP profile ↗
1ranked-venue papers
0as first author
1since 2021 · last 2026
0009-0006-5213-2146ORCID · reported
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1 · 1 since 2021
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Databases, data mining, and information retrieval
1 paper |
Recommender systems · 100% |
Topics — the 2 heaviest of 2, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Recommender systems › explainable recommendation
counterfactual explanation |
1.0 | 1 | 2026 | From Top-1 to Top-K: A Reproducibility Study and Benchmarking of Counterfactual Explanations for Recommender Systems · SIGIR 2026 |
Recommender systems
explainable recommendation |
1.0 | 1 | 2026 | From Top-1 to Top-K: A Reproducibility Study and Benchmarking of Counterfactual Explanations for Recommender Systems · SIGIR 2026 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
SHAP · 1.0PRINCE · 1.0LXR · 1.0LIME-RS · 1.0GREASE · 1.0ACCENT · 1.0
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | From Top-1 to Top-K: A Reproducibility Study and Benchmarking of Counterfactual Explanations for Recommender SystemsabstractCounterfactual explanations (CEs) provide an intuitive way to understand recommender systems by identifying minimal modifications to user-item interactions that alter recommendation outcomes. Existing CE methods for recommender systems, however, have been evaluated under heterogeneous protocols, using different datasets, recommenders, metrics, and even explanation formats, which hampers reproducibility and fair comparison. Our paper systematically reproduces, re-implement, and re-evaluate eleven state-of-the-art CE methods for recommender systems, covering both native explainers (e.g., LIME-RS, SHAP, PRINCE, ACCENT, LXR, GREASE) and specific graph-based explainers originally proposed for GNNs. Here, a unified benchmarking framework is proposed to assess explainers along three dimensions: explanation format (implicit vs. explicit), evaluation level (item-level vs. list-level), and perturbation scope (user interaction vectors vs. user-item interaction graphs). Our evaluation protocol includes effectiveness, sparsity, and computational complexity metrics, and extends existing item-level assessments to top-K list-level explanations. Through extensive experiments on three real-world datasets and six representative recommender models, we analyze how well previously reported strengths of CE methods generalize across diverse setups. We observe that the trade-off between effectiveness and sparsity depends strongly on the specific method and evaluation setting, particularly under the explicit format; in addition, explainer performance remains largely consistent across item level and list level evaluations, and several graph-based explainers exhibit notable scalability limitations on large recommender graphs. Our results refine and challenge earlier conclusions about the robustness and practicality of CE generation methods in recommender systems: https://github.com/L2R-UET/CFExpRec. Khac-Manh Thai, Duc-Hoang Pham, Huy-Son Nguyen, Cam-Van Thi Nguyen, Masoud Mansoury, Duc-Trong Le, Hoang-Quynh Le |
SIGIR | 3 |