arXiv AI

When Do Explanations Help In-Context Learning? A Comparative Study of Natural Language Explanation Types and Faithfulness

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).

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Human Label Variation as Stable Signal: Learning Annotator-Specific Explanation Behavior via Cross-Annotator Preference Optimization

The paper investigates whether large language models can learn and reproduce annotator‑specific label‑explanation behavior, using two sentence‑pair tasks with four annotators each. It finds that individual annotator patterns are weak at the single‑annotation level but become detectable after reducing input‑content effects and aggregating across annotators. The authors propose cross‑annotator preference optimization (CAPO), which improves upon prompting and supervised fine‑tuning by better capturing annotator‑specific reasoning while maintaining stable attribution.

By Beiduo Chen, Pingjun Hong, Ziyun Zhang, Benjamin Roth, Anna Korhonen, Barbara Plank
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Can Large Language Models Still Explain Themselves? Investigating the Impact of Quantization on Self-Explanations

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.

By Qianli Wang, Nils Feldhus, Pepa Atanasova, Fedor Splitt, Simon Ostermann, Sebastian M\"oller, Vera Schmitt
arXiv AI
Jul 1

Shared Lexical Task Representations Explain Behavioral Variability In LLMs

arXiv:2604. 22027v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: One of the most common complaints about large language models (LLMs) is their prompt sensitivity -- that is, the fact that their ability to perform a task or provide a correct answer to a question can depend unpredictably on the way the question is posed.

By Zhuonan Yang, Jacob Xiaochen Li, Francisco Piedrahita Velez, Eric Todd, David Bau, Michael L. Littman, Stephen H. Bach, Ellie Pavlick