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.
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.
The paper investigates counterfactual self‑explanations in large language models, where a model edits an input minimally to change its own prediction. Experiments on sentiment analysis and natural language inference with ten instruction‑tuned models from the LLaMA‑3 and Qwen‑2.5 families show that larger models produce more faithful, minimal, and human‑aligned counterfactuals. While rationale‑guided prompts improve minimality and alignment, they do not consistently enhance faithfulness, indicating that explanation quality depends heavily on model capacity and requires empirical validation.
The paper proposes a test‑time method to enhance the faithfulness of large language model (LLM) explanations by removing concepts not credited in the model’s explanation before re‑querying the model. This approach targets incompleteness—omissions of influential factors—rather than unsoundness, and is model‑agnostic, requiring no changes to model weights. Experiments across two datasets and multiple model families show improved faithfulness compared to standard prompting and faithfulness‑encouraging prompts.
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).
The paper discusses how Large Language Models can produce natural language self‑explanations that appear plausible but may not accurately reflect the model’s reasoning. It critiques current evaluation methods for such explanations and offers practical guidelines to assess their plausibility and faithfulness. Additionally, it argues that evaluation should also consider the actionability of these explanations, showing how they can aid decision‑making for various stakeholders.
The paper investigates how quantization affects large language models’ self‑explanations, examining natural language explanations and counterfactual examples across three quantization techniques and bit widths. Results show moderate declines in explanation quality (up to 4.4%) and faithfulness (up to 3.9%), with user studies indicating up to an 8.5% drop in coherence and trustworthiness. Larger models are less resilient in quality but remain more faithful, and no single quantization method consistently outperforms others across accuracy, quality, and faithfulness.
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:2609.34187v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The strong version of the stochastic parrot argument claims that, although large language models (LLMs) may exceed rote regurgitation, they c...
arXiv:2609.07943v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: There is significant uncertainty about whether abstractions like beliefs or desires usefully describe the behavior of large language models (LLMs). In...
The paper introduces CoT-Interpretability Alignment (CIA), a metric that quantifies how well a large language model’s chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations match its internal reasoning processes. Evaluated on two-hop question answering, hint intervention, and integer multiplication across three LLMs, the study finds limited alignment (44.8–75.9%) and demonstrates that post‑training with a reward combining task accuracy and parametric faithfulness can substantially improve CoT faithfulness without sacrificing accuracy. The authors provide a framework for auditing CoT faithfulness and a pathway to making explicit reasoning more trustworthy, with code and data publicly available.
arXiv:2503. 13445v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When asked to explain their decisions, LLMs can often give explanations which sound plausible to humans.
arXiv:2603. 14894v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Trust and ethical concerns due to the widespread deployment of opaque machine learning (ML) models motivating the need for reliable model explanations.