FiRe: Fixed-Noise Refinement for Visual Counterfactual Explanations

Abstract

Visual counterfactual explanations aim to change classifier decisions through realistic and localized edits while preserving decision-irrelevant content. Existing DDPM-based methods typically perform classifier-guided editing along a long reverse denoising trajectory. The changing noise levels make semantic editability and spatial control difficult to balance, and the editable state is noisy, whereas the target classifier is trained on clean images. As a result, these methods require either costly recursive denoising or low-quality one-step estimates to obtain classifier-facing clean images. We propose FiRe, a Fixed-noise Refinement framework for visual counterfactual explanations. Rather than following a reverse denoising trajectory, FiRe maps the input to a fixed noise level and iteratively refines the noisy state at that level. To provide clean images for classifier guidance, FiRe first adapts Pixel Mean Flow to visual counterfactual explanation, enabling direct clean-image prediction from noisy states. To make fixed-noise refinement produce minimal and localized counterfactual edits, FiRe introduces three FiRe-specific controls: a dynamic dual-mask strategy, adaptive guidance, and early stopping, which determine where edits accumulate, which changes become visible, and when refinement stops. Experiments on five tasks across three datasets show that, compared with the strongest recent baseline, FiRe achieves about 3$\times$ faster online inference and 8$\times$ fewer FLOPs while obtaining comparable or state-of-the-art counterfactual quality.