Evaluating the Reliability of Self-Explanations in Large Language Models

2024-07-19

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This work addresses the authenticity and reliability of self-generated explanations by large language models (LLMs), revealing a pervasive disconnect between explanations and actual reasoning processes—across both objective and subjective tasks. Method: We introduce the first multidimensional reliability evaluation framework that explicitly distinguishes surface plausibility from genuine causal fidelity. Our approach validates explanations via reasoning trajectory alignment, integrating human annotation, logical consistency checking, gradient-based attribution analysis, and counterfactual perturbation testing to establish a reproducible, quantitative protocol for explanation trustworthiness. Contribution/Results: Empirical evaluation shows that over 60% of self-explanations from mainstream LLMs fail reasoning-path verification; moreover, improved model performance does not correlate with enhanced explanation reliability. This study establishes a novel paradigm and benchmark toolkit for rigorous LLM interpretability assessment.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs)
• Natural Language Processing: Interpretability, Analysis, and Evaluation of NLP Models
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Relational Probabilistic Models

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Large Language Models (LLM) for user modeling and recommendation
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI

Problem

• Language Model Evaluation
• Text Generation Interpretation
• Objective and Subjective Tasks

Innovation

• Large Language Models
• Causal Inference
• Interpretability Enhancement