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.
By Nhi Nguyen, Shauli Ravfogel, Rajesh Ranganath
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:2503. 13445v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When asked to explain their decisions, LLMs can often give explanations which sound plausible to humans.
By Noah Y. Siegel, Nicolas Heess, Maria Perez-Ortiz, Oana-Maria Camburu
arXiv:2606. 30653v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed in agentic pipelines that depend on the model evaluating its own outputs without external verification.
By Marina Mancoridis, Zo\"e Hitzig
arXiv:2608. 05188v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite ever-increasing sophistication in language model (LM) pre- and post-training pipelines, many important failures persist: models overcondition on user framing ("sycophancy"), exhibit incomplete logical generalization, and produce confident but incorrect responses.
By Itamar Pres, Belinda Z. Li, Laura Ruis, Zifan Carl Guo, Keya Hu, Mehul Damani, Isha Puri, Ekdeep Singh Lubana, Jacob Andreas
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.
By Elize Herrewijnen, Benedetta Muscato, Gizem Gezici, Fosca Giannotti