Inference to the Best Explanation in Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Dalal, Dhairya, Valentino, Marco, Freitas, André, Buitelaar, Paul
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866929736801845248
author Dalal, Dhairya
Valentino, Marco
Freitas, André
Buitelaar, Paul
author_facet Dalal, Dhairya
Valentino, Marco
Freitas, André
Buitelaar, Paul
contents While Large Language Models (LLMs) have found success in real-world applications, their underlying explanatory process is still poorly understood. This paper proposes IBE-Eval, a framework inspired by philosophical accounts on Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) to advance the interpretation and evaluation of LLMs' explanations. IBE-Eval estimates the plausibility of natural language explanations through a combination of explicit logical and linguistic features including: consistency, parsimony, coherence, and uncertainty. Extensive experiments are conducted on Causal Question Answering (CQA), where \textit{IBE-Eval} is tasked to select the most plausible causal explanation amongst competing ones generated by LLMs (i.e., GPT 3.5 and Llama 2). The experiments reveal that IBE-Eval can successfully identify the best explanation with up to 77\% accuracy ($\approx 27\%$ above random), improving upon a GPT 3.5-as-a-Judge baseline ($\approx+17\%$) while being intrinsically more efficient and interpretable. Additional analyses suggest that, despite model-specific variances, LLM-generated explanations tend to conform to IBE criteria and that IBE-Eval is significantly correlated with human judgment, opening up opportunities for future development of automated explanation verification tools.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_10767
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Inference to the Best Explanation in Large Language Models
Dalal, Dhairya
Valentino, Marco
Freitas, André
Buitelaar, Paul
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.7
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have found success in real-world applications, their underlying explanatory process is still poorly understood. This paper proposes IBE-Eval, a framework inspired by philosophical accounts on Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) to advance the interpretation and evaluation of LLMs' explanations. IBE-Eval estimates the plausibility of natural language explanations through a combination of explicit logical and linguistic features including: consistency, parsimony, coherence, and uncertainty. Extensive experiments are conducted on Causal Question Answering (CQA), where \textit{IBE-Eval} is tasked to select the most plausible causal explanation amongst competing ones generated by LLMs (i.e., GPT 3.5 and Llama 2). The experiments reveal that IBE-Eval can successfully identify the best explanation with up to 77\% accuracy ($\approx 27\%$ above random), improving upon a GPT 3.5-as-a-Judge baseline ($\approx+17\%$) while being intrinsically more efficient and interpretable. Additional analyses suggest that, despite model-specific variances, LLM-generated explanations tend to conform to IBE criteria and that IBE-Eval is significantly correlated with human judgment, opening up opportunities for future development of automated explanation verification tools.
title Inference to the Best Explanation in Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.10767