Harnessing LLMs Explanations to Boost Surrogate Models in Tabular Data Classification

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Hauptverfasser: Shi, Ruxue, Gu, Hengrui, Shen, Xu, Wang, Xin
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Shi, Ruxue
Gu, Hengrui
Shen, Xu
Wang, Xin
author_facet Shi, Ruxue
Gu, Hengrui
Shen, Xu
Wang, Xin
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable ability in solving complex tasks, making them a promising tool for enhancing tabular learning. However, existing LLM-based methods suffer from high resource requirements, suboptimal demonstration selection, and limited interpretability, which largely hinder their prediction performance and application in the real world. To overcome these problems, we propose a novel in-context learning framework for tabular prediction. The core idea is to leverage the explanations generated by LLMs to guide a smaller, locally deployable Surrogate Language Model (SLM) to make interpretable tabular predictions. Specifically, our framework mainly involves three stages: (i) Post Hoc Explanation Generation, where LLMs are utilized to generate explanations for question-answer pairs in candidate demonstrations, providing insights into the reasoning behind the answer. (ii) Post Hoc Explanation-Guided Demonstrations Selection, which utilizes explanations generated by LLMs to guide the process of demonstration selection from candidate demonstrations. (iii) Post Hoc Explanation-Guided Interpretable SLM Prediction, which utilizes the demonstrations obtained in step (ii) as in-context and merges corresponding explanations as rationales to improve the performance of SLM and guide the model to generate interpretable outputs. Experimental results highlight the framework's effectiveness, with an average accuracy improvement of 5.31% across various tabular datasets in diverse domains.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_05744
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Harnessing LLMs Explanations to Boost Surrogate Models in Tabular Data Classification
Shi, Ruxue
Gu, Hengrui
Shen, Xu
Wang, Xin
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable ability in solving complex tasks, making them a promising tool for enhancing tabular learning. However, existing LLM-based methods suffer from high resource requirements, suboptimal demonstration selection, and limited interpretability, which largely hinder their prediction performance and application in the real world. To overcome these problems, we propose a novel in-context learning framework for tabular prediction. The core idea is to leverage the explanations generated by LLMs to guide a smaller, locally deployable Surrogate Language Model (SLM) to make interpretable tabular predictions. Specifically, our framework mainly involves three stages: (i) Post Hoc Explanation Generation, where LLMs are utilized to generate explanations for question-answer pairs in candidate demonstrations, providing insights into the reasoning behind the answer. (ii) Post Hoc Explanation-Guided Demonstrations Selection, which utilizes explanations generated by LLMs to guide the process of demonstration selection from candidate demonstrations. (iii) Post Hoc Explanation-Guided Interpretable SLM Prediction, which utilizes the demonstrations obtained in step (ii) as in-context and merges corresponding explanations as rationales to improve the performance of SLM and guide the model to generate interpretable outputs. Experimental results highlight the framework's effectiveness, with an average accuracy improvement of 5.31% across various tabular datasets in diverse domains.
title Harnessing LLMs Explanations to Boost Surrogate Models in Tabular Data Classification
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05744