arXiv Computation and Language

From Plausible to Actionable: A Position on LLM Self-Explanations

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.

arXiv AI
Sep 11

XAI-Arena: Can LLMs Assess the Quality of XAI Explanations?

XAI-Arena proposes using large language models (LLMs) as judges to evaluate the quality of explainable AI (XAI) explanations, aiming for reproducibility, scalability, and multidimensional assessment. The framework assesses dimensions such as simplicity, clarity, task adequacy, trust calibration, actionability, transparency, faithfulness, and overall interpretability across different datasets, models, and stakeholder personas. Human validation shows a strong positive correlation between LLM-generated and human ratings (Spearman's rho = .693, p < .001), supporting the viability of LLM-based evaluations.

By Yanfei Hu Fleischhauer, Alona Zharova, Nadja Klein, Stefan Feuerriegel
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Explaining AI Agents Through Execution Traces

arXiv:2609.06063v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI Agents are increasingly deployed in real-world settings, where they interact with external tools and make sequential decisions with limited human ov...

By Vittoria Vineis, Fabiano Veglianti, Lorenzo Antonelli, Claudia Di Carlo, Matteo Silvestri, Gabriele Tolomei
arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

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
Jul 17

Position: Explainability Research Must Prioritize Foundations over Ad-hoc Methods

arXiv:2607. 14123v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite the proliferation of Explainable AI (XAI) techniques -- from feature attributions to sparse autoencoders -- explanations rarely influence real-world workflows.

By Michal Moshkovitz, Suraj Srinivas, Lesia Semenova, Nave Frost, Cyrus Rashtchian, Valentyn Boreiko, Shichang Zhang, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Cynthia Rudin, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Attribute-Based Activation Steering of LLMs for Group-Specific Explanation Generation

The paper proposes a method to steer large language models (LLMs) to generate explanations tailored to specific target groups. It first identifies group-specific attributes related to explanatory style and knowledge, then uses activation engineering to compute steering vectors that are added to the LLM’s internal activations during inference. Experiments show that this attribute-based steering improves specificity and factuality of explanations compared to prompting and existing steering baselines, and a human study confirms better tailoring to target groups.

By Leandra Fichtel, Janek Prange, Henning Wachsmuth