arXiv AI By Zikai Zhou, Jiacheng Sang, Yilin Xu, Yufei Jin, Monica S. Lam

Did the Model Use That? Counterfactual Training Boosts Self-Attribution in Language Models

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The paper investigates whether language models can self‑attribute the influence of external information on their answers and proposes a counterfactual training method called CREDIT to improve this ability. Experiments show that most state‑of‑the‑art models rarely attribute influential information and often attribute non‑influential information, and that CREDIT significantly enhances attribution in several open models, outperforming other fine‑tuning and prompting approaches. CREDIT also distinguishes between answers that are genuinely changed by user suggestions and those that would have been given regardless, with some transfer to unseen information types and conflicting prompts.

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