arXiv Machine Learning

iFlip: Iterative Feedback-driven Counterfactual Example Refinement

iFlip is an iterative refinement method for generating counterfactual examples using large language models. It incorporates three feedback types—model confidence, feature attribution, and natural language—to guide successive edits. Experiments show iFlip outperforms five state‑of‑the‑art baselines, achieving a 57.8% higher validity rate and improving model performance through counterfactual data augmentation.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 16

An Empirical Study of Counterfactual Self-Explanations in LLMs

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.

By Giannis Kalyvas, Giorgos Filandrianos, Orfeas Menis Mastromichalakis, Vassilis Lyberatos, Giorgos Stamou
arXiv AI
Jun 3

Fixing FOLIO and MALLS: Verified Annotations and an LLM-assisted Framework to Focus Human Relabeling

arXiv:2606. 02837v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate translation from Natural Language to First-Order Logic (NL-to-FOL) underpins neurosymbolic AI systems and Natural Language Inference (NLI), making the quality of NL-to-FOL benchmarks essential -- yet these datasets have never been rigorously audited.

By Andrea Brunello, Cristian Curaba, Luca Geatti, Michele Mignani, Angelo Montanari, Nicola Saccomanno
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 9

Counterfactual Modeling with Fine-Tuned LLMs for Health Intervention Design and Sensor Data Augmentation

arXiv:2601. 14590v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Counterfactual explanations (CFEs) provide human-centric interpretability by identifying the minimal, actionable changes required to alter a machine learning model's prediction.

By Shovito Barua Soumma, Asiful Arefeen, Stephanie M. Carpenter, Melanie Hingle, Hassan Ghasemzadeh
arXiv AI
Jun 6

Macro: Enhancing Multilingual Counterfactual Explanations through Alignment-as-Preference Optimization

arXiv:2605. 11632v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-generated counterfactual explanations (SCEs) are minimally modified inputs (minimality) generated by large language models (LLMs) that flip their own predictions (validity), offering a causally grounded approach to unraveling black-box LLM behavior.

By Yilong Wang, Qianli Wang, Bohao Chu, Yihong Liu, Jing Yang, Simon Ostermann
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Evaluating and Improving Evidence-Grounded Fact-Checking in LLMs via Multi-Round Evidence Ablation

The paper introduces Fact-Ablated Evaluation (FAE), a framework that iteratively removes cited evidence to test whether large language models (LLMs) adjust their fact‑checking predictions accordingly. Experiments reveal that many off‑the‑shelf LLMs rely more on internal knowledge than on the provided evidence. To address this, the authors propose REAL, a training method that uses counterfactual evidence supervision to encourage LLMs to base veracity judgments on evidence, achieving better evidence‑dependent performance across four datasets.

By Xingyu Deng, Mingzi Cao, Nikolaos Aletras, Xi Wang, Mark Stevenson
arXiv AI
Oct 12

CoBe: A Benchmark For Conversational Counterfactual Text Editing

CoBe is a benchmark that evaluates a model’s ability to perform conversational counterfactual text editing, requiring the model to revise a given scenario based on a hypothetical change while preserving unaffected facts. The dataset includes 2,000 questions across domains such as healthcare, science, engineering, business, and everyday life. Experiments show that current models often default to associational generation rather than maintaining causal structure, and performance does not reliably improve with larger model size or longer outputs.

By Arvind Raghavan, Inwoo Hwang, Shreyas Havaldar, Kai-Zhan Lee, Aurghya Maiti, Yushu Pan, Jeffrey Wu, Mingxuan Li, Elias Bareinboim
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

User Feedback Provides a Unique Signal that LLMs Can not Detect

The paper argues that user feedback from real interactions is a valuable learning signal for Large Language Models (LLMs), contrary to recent claims that it is too noisy to use. By creating synthetic data with a clear ground truth and testing on naturalistic data, the authors show that revisions guided by user feedback fix targeted issues more often than baseline revisions. They further reveal that current evaluation methods bias against feedback‑driven improvements, as judges tend to overlook genuinely corrected responses and favor inferior baselines.

By Shachar Don-Yehiya, Leshem Choshen, Omri Abend
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Beyond Aggregate Scores: Behavioral Correctness Assumptions for Assessing Reference-Based Automatic Evaluation Methods

The paper introduces behavioral correctness assumptions as a new framework for evaluating reference-based automatic evaluation methods in natural language generation. It defines a taxonomy of correctness-preserving and correctness-altering assumptions and operationalizes them through controlled response transformations to specify expected scoring behaviors. The authors evaluate a range of lexical, character-level, semantic, LLM-based, and hybrid evaluators, analyzing their behavior across multiple dimensions and finding that no evaluator satisfies all assumptions, revealing distinct behavioral trade-offs not evident from aggregate scores.

By Maria Mahbub, Ashley Rice, Michael R. Munroe, Amidu Kamara, Amir Sadovnik