Does This Moment Justify the Recommendation? Counterfactual Behavior-Grounded Evidence Retrieval for Personalized Video Recommendation

Abstract

Personalized video recommendation predicts user preference at the video level, while temporal video grounding localizes query-relevant moments. However, strong localization does not establish whether the retrieved moment constitutes valid evidence for recommending the video to a particular user. We study counterfactual behavior-grounded evidence retrieval, which separates where personalized evidence occurs from whether such evidence exists and evaluates whether model predictions respond consistently when that evidence is replaced. We introduce CBGER-10K, containing 5,000 controlled factual--counterfactual pairs for 3,026 users, where each pair replaces only the focal behavior-supported segment while preserving the user, temporal position, and hard distractors. We further propose CBGER, a compact framework that decouples segment-level localization from video-level evidence estimation and learns both through structured counterfactual supervision. CBGER achieves $0.4432$ MRR, $0.6977$ Pair Accuracy, and $0.6987$ Intervention Consistency across five adapted personalized-highlight and temporal-grounding baselines. Notably, compared with QD-DETR, its MRR improvement is not statistically significant, while Pair Accuracy improves by $11.03$ points. These results show that accurate temporal localization does not necessarily imply reliable personalized evidence existence, motivating explicit evaluation of Whether alongside Where.