The Probabilities Also Matter: A More Faithful Metric for Faithfulness of Free-Text Explanations in Large Language Models

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Hauptverfasser: Siegel, Noah Y., Camburu, Oana-Maria, Heess, Nicolas, Perez-Ortiz, Maria
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Siegel, Noah Y.
Camburu, Oana-Maria
Heess, Nicolas
Perez-Ortiz, Maria
author_facet Siegel, Noah Y.
Camburu, Oana-Maria
Heess, Nicolas
Perez-Ortiz, Maria
contents In order to oversee advanced AI systems, it is important to understand their underlying decision-making process. When prompted, large language models (LLMs) can provide natural language explanations or reasoning traces that sound plausible and receive high ratings from human annotators. However, it is unclear to what extent these explanations are faithful, i.e., truly capture the factors responsible for the model's predictions. In this work, we introduce Correlational Explanatory Faithfulness (CEF), a metric that can be used in faithfulness tests based on input interventions. Previous metrics used in such tests take into account only binary changes in the predictions. Our metric accounts for the total shift in the model's predicted label distribution, more accurately reflecting the explanations' faithfulness. We then introduce the Correlational Counterfactual Test (CCT) by instantiating CEF on the Counterfactual Test (CT) from Atanasova et al. (2023). We evaluate the faithfulness of free-text explanations generated by few-shot-prompted LLMs from the Llama2 family on three NLP tasks. We find that our metric measures aspects of faithfulness which the CT misses.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_03189
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publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Probabilities Also Matter: A More Faithful Metric for Faithfulness of Free-Text Explanations in Large Language Models
Siegel, Noah Y.
Camburu, Oana-Maria
Heess, Nicolas
Perez-Ortiz, Maria
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
In order to oversee advanced AI systems, it is important to understand their underlying decision-making process. When prompted, large language models (LLMs) can provide natural language explanations or reasoning traces that sound plausible and receive high ratings from human annotators. However, it is unclear to what extent these explanations are faithful, i.e., truly capture the factors responsible for the model's predictions. In this work, we introduce Correlational Explanatory Faithfulness (CEF), a metric that can be used in faithfulness tests based on input interventions. Previous metrics used in such tests take into account only binary changes in the predictions. Our metric accounts for the total shift in the model's predicted label distribution, more accurately reflecting the explanations' faithfulness. We then introduce the Correlational Counterfactual Test (CCT) by instantiating CEF on the Counterfactual Test (CT) from Atanasova et al. (2023). We evaluate the faithfulness of free-text explanations generated by few-shot-prompted LLMs from the Llama2 family on three NLP tasks. We find that our metric measures aspects of faithfulness which the CT misses.
title The Probabilities Also Matter: A More Faithful Metric for Faithfulness of Free-Text Explanations in Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.03189