Can Language Models Explain Their Own Classification Behavior?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Sherburn, Dane, Chughtai, Bilal, Evans, Owain
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Sherburn, Dane
Chughtai, Bilal
Evans, Owain
author_facet Sherburn, Dane
Chughtai, Bilal
Evans, Owain
contents Large language models (LLMs) perform well at a myriad of tasks, but explaining the processes behind this performance is a challenge. This paper investigates whether LLMs can give faithful high-level explanations of their own internal processes. To explore this, we introduce a dataset, ArticulateRules, of few-shot text-based classification tasks generated by simple rules. Each rule is associated with a simple natural-language explanation. We test whether models that have learned to classify inputs competently (both in- and out-of-distribution) are able to articulate freeform natural language explanations that match their classification behavior. Our dataset can be used for both in-context and finetuning evaluations. We evaluate a range of LLMs, demonstrating that articulation accuracy varies considerably between models, with a particularly sharp increase from GPT-3 to GPT-4. We then investigate whether we can improve GPT-3's articulation accuracy through a range of methods. GPT-3 completely fails to articulate 7/10 rules in our test, even after additional finetuning on correct explanations. We release our dataset, ArticulateRules, which can be used to test self-explanation for LLMs trained either in-context or by finetuning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_07436
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can Language Models Explain Their Own Classification Behavior?
Sherburn, Dane
Chughtai, Bilal
Evans, Owain
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Large language models (LLMs) perform well at a myriad of tasks, but explaining the processes behind this performance is a challenge. This paper investigates whether LLMs can give faithful high-level explanations of their own internal processes. To explore this, we introduce a dataset, ArticulateRules, of few-shot text-based classification tasks generated by simple rules. Each rule is associated with a simple natural-language explanation. We test whether models that have learned to classify inputs competently (both in- and out-of-distribution) are able to articulate freeform natural language explanations that match their classification behavior. Our dataset can be used for both in-context and finetuning evaluations. We evaluate a range of LLMs, demonstrating that articulation accuracy varies considerably between models, with a particularly sharp increase from GPT-3 to GPT-4. We then investigate whether we can improve GPT-3's articulation accuracy through a range of methods. GPT-3 completely fails to articulate 7/10 rules in our test, even after additional finetuning on correct explanations. We release our dataset, ArticulateRules, which can be used to test self-explanation for LLMs trained either in-context or by finetuning.
title Can Language Models Explain Their Own Classification Behavior?
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.07436