The paper proposes a test‑time method to enhance the faithfulness of large language model (LLM) explanations by removing concepts that are not credited in the model’s explanation before re‑querying the model. This approach directly addresses the incompleteness dimension of unfaithful explanations, unlike prior methods that mainly target unsoundness. Experiments across two datasets, multiple model families, and two faithfulness metrics show that the method improves explanation faithfulness over standard prompting and faithfulness‑encouraging prompts, and it is model‑agnostic and requires no parameter changes.
arXiv:2606. 28615v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains, where free-text explanations such as chain-of-thought and post-hoc rationales are used to justify model outputs.
By Nhi Nguyen, Shauli Ravfogel, Rajesh Ranganath
arXiv:2607. 21090v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL) method to directly optimize the faithfulness of self-explanations - the extent to which a model's generated reasoning accurately reflects its internal decision-making process.
By Yeoktatt Cheah, Mar\'ia P\'erez-Ortiz, Noah Y. Siegel, Oana-Maria Camburu
arXiv:2607. 04572v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) tutors often produce fluent step-by-step explanations, but a correct and pedagogically formatted response does not guarantee that the answer was derived from the student-facing problem.
By Bonan Shen, Dingyan Shang, Youting Wang, Tao Ning
arXiv:2503. 13445v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When asked to explain their decisions, LLMs can often give explanations which sound plausible to humans.
By Noah Y. Siegel, Nicolas Heess, Maria Perez-Ortiz, Oana-Maria Camburu
arXiv:2606. 16110v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning has been extensively studied in response to growing privacy concerns and regulatory requirements.
By Dayong Ye, Tianqing Zhu, Ruiding Huang, Xinbo Fu, Jiayang Li, Bo Liu, Huan Huo, Wanlei Zhou
arXiv:2608.30581v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are used as post hoc explainers of sequential decision-making policies, producing natural-language explanations of why an...
By Dennis Gross, Helge Spieker
arXiv:2607. 19355v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLMs are increasingly used with external knowledge sources like the internet.
By Joshua Ashkinaze, Laura Kurek, Alina Faisal, Tongyuan Miao, Mariam Joseph, Ceren Budak, Eric Gilbert
arXiv:2608. 16627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Natural language explanations (NLEs) are increasingly used as inputs, for example, as few-shot rationales that influence model behavior in in-context learning (ICL).
By Mahdi Dhaini, Adam Dejl, Juraj Vladika, Volkan \"Ozer, Barbara Plank, Gjergji Kasneci
arXiv:2602. 20710v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Inspecting Chain-of-Thought reasoning is among the most common means of understanding why an LLM produced its output.
By Peter Hase, Christopher Potts
The paper introduces a method for identifying the dominant knowledge source behind large language model (LLM) outputs, distinguishing between faithfulness violations (misuse of provided context) and factuality violations (errors in internal knowledge). A simple linear probe trained on hidden representations can reliably classify this source, and the authors present AttriWiki, a self‑supervised pipeline that generates labeled training data by prompting models to recall withheld entities or read them from context. Probes trained on AttriWiki achieve high Macro‑F1 scores across several models and datasets, generalize zero‑shot to a benchmark, and show that attribution mismatches can increase error rates by up to 70%.
"whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that knowing the source of an LLM’s answer is crucial for effective mitigation of hallucinations, as attribution mismatches significantly raise error rates."
By Ivo Brink, Alexander Boer, Dennis Ulmer
Machine unlearning has been extensively studied in response to growing privacy concerns and regulatory requirements. However, auditing whether unlearning algorithms have truly erased the influence of specific data remains an open challenge.