{
  "schema_version": 1,
  "builder_plan": {
    "scenario": "Start with one repeated product task that has a measurable failure or cost.",
    "change": "Read the methods and identify one change you can isolate in that workflow.",
    "baseline": "Your current implementation on the same held-out tasks.",
    "steps": [
      "Locate the paper's implementation and check its license, model support, data needs, and hardware requirements. Stop here if you cannot obtain the required artifacts.",
      "Save a small set of representative product tasks and expected outcomes. Keep evaluation tasks out of any training or tuning, and choose quality and cost limits before running.",
      "Run the baseline and the proposed change on identical inputs. Keep other settings fixed and repeat paired runs to expose variation.",
      "Save per-task outputs, failures, timings, and all usage costs. Review regressions before expanding the test."
    ],
    "measure": "Successful outcomes, response time, human rework, and total cost per successful task.",
    "decision": "Keep the change only if it meets your preselected quality and latency limits and improves the metric you care about after setup and operating costs. Otherwise retain the baseline. This is an exploration plan, not a validated recommendation."
  },
  "builder_review": null,
  "arxiv_id": "2609.19383",
  "title": "FCx: An algorithm for finding Feasible Counterfactual Explanations",
  "summary": "FCx replaces standard counterfactual explanation generators (e.g., Wachter-style optimization or VAE-based methods) that can output infeasible changes, by adding hard user-specified constraints and soft causal constraints inferred from the data, with realism enforced via LOF density and a multi-factor loss. The cost is training and tuning a modified VAE per dataset with a multi-term objective, plus the need for domain knowledge or reliable causal inference to define feasibility, which fits a single 24 GB GPU but adds pipeline complexity. It can fail if the inferred soft constraints encode incorrect causal assumptions, if LOF density poorly characterizes the data manifold on sparse or high-dimensional tabular data, or if feasibility constraints leave no valid counterfactual in dense regions.",
  "rationale": "The method is computationally modest and relevant only if the reader's production models require actionable explanations, so it warrants a small-scale trial on their own data before adoption.",
  "technique": "Feasible counterfactual explanations via modified VAE",
  "family": "outro",
  "recommendation": "testar",
  "published": "2026-09-16",
  "as_of": "2026-10-18",
  "editorial_status": "indexed",
  "source_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19383",
  "independent_implementations": 0,
  "total_implementations": 1,
  "stars": 0,
  "citations": 0,
  "claims": [
    {
      "claim_id": "claim-01",
      "statement": "FCx replaces standard counterfactual explanation generators (e.g., Wachter-style optimization or VAE-based methods) that can output infeasible changes, by adding hard user-specified constraints and soft causal constraints inferred from the data, with realism enforced via LOF density and a multi-factor loss. The cost is training and tuning a modified VAE per dataset with a multi-term objective, plus the need for domain knowledge or reliable causal inference to define feasibility, which fits a single 24 GB GPU but adds pipeline complexity. It can fail if the inferred soft constraints encode incorrect causal assumptions, if LOF density poorly characterizes the data manifold on sparse or high-dimensional tabular data, or if feasibility constraints leave no valid counterfactual in dense regions.",
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    },
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      "claim_id": "claim-02",
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  ],
  "exposure_map": [
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      "dimension": "latency",
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    },
    {
      "dimension": "operations",
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    },
    {
      "dimension": "compatibility",
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    },
    {
      "dimension": "security",
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      "finding": "",
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    },
    {
      "dimension": "data_and_training",
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      "source_page": null,
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    },
    {
      "dimension": "reproducibility",
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      "source_page": null,
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    }
  ],
  "risks": [],
  "minimum_test": [],
  "open_questions": [],
  "independent_tests": [],
  "lab_reproductions": [],
  "report_available": false,
  "validation_tier": "unknown",
  "evidence_tier": "unknown",
  "infrastructure_basis": "unknown",
  "equations": [],
  "equations_status": "not_fetched",
  "core_kind": "",
  "equations_fetched_at": "",
  "equations_source_url": "",
  "equations_source_sha256": "",
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}