Reasoning-Grounded Natural Language Explanations for Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Cahlik, Vojtech, Alves, Rodrigo, Kordik, Pavel
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866911513261899776
author Cahlik, Vojtech
Alves, Rodrigo
Kordik, Pavel
author_facet Cahlik, Vojtech
Alves, Rodrigo
Kordik, Pavel
contents We propose a large language model explainability technique for obtaining faithful natural language explanations by grounding the explanations in a reasoning process. When converted to a sequence of tokens, the outputs of the reasoning process can become part of the model context and later be decoded to natural language as the model produces either the final answer or the explanation. To improve the faithfulness of the explanations, we propose to use a joint predict-explain approach, in which the answers and explanations are inferred directly from the reasoning sequence, without the explanations being dependent on the answers and vice versa. We demonstrate the plausibility of the proposed technique by achieving a high alignment between answers and explanations in several problem domains, observing that language models often simply copy the partial decisions from the reasoning sequence into the final answers or explanations. Furthermore, we show that the proposed use of reasoning can also improve the quality of the answers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_11248
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reasoning-Grounded Natural Language Explanations for Language Models
Cahlik, Vojtech
Alves, Rodrigo
Kordik, Pavel
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
We propose a large language model explainability technique for obtaining faithful natural language explanations by grounding the explanations in a reasoning process. When converted to a sequence of tokens, the outputs of the reasoning process can become part of the model context and later be decoded to natural language as the model produces either the final answer or the explanation. To improve the faithfulness of the explanations, we propose to use a joint predict-explain approach, in which the answers and explanations are inferred directly from the reasoning sequence, without the explanations being dependent on the answers and vice versa. We demonstrate the plausibility of the proposed technique by achieving a high alignment between answers and explanations in several problem domains, observing that language models often simply copy the partial decisions from the reasoning sequence into the final answers or explanations. Furthermore, we show that the proposed use of reasoning can also improve the quality of the answers.
title Reasoning-Grounded Natural Language Explanations for Language Models
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11248