Learning to Seek Evidence: A Verifiable Reasoning Agent with Causal Faithfulness Analysis

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Huang, Yuhang, Lin, Zekai, Zhong, Fan, Liu, Lei
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Huang, Yuhang
Lin, Zekai
Zhong, Fan
Liu, Lei
author_facet Huang, Yuhang
Lin, Zekai
Zhong, Fan
Liu, Lei
contents Explanations for AI models in high-stakes domains like medicine often lack verifiability, which can hinder trust. To address this, we propose an interactive agent that produces explanations through an auditable sequence of actions. The agent learns a policy to strategically seek external visual evidence to support its diagnostic reasoning. This policy is optimized using reinforcement learning, resulting in a model that is both efficient and generalizable. Our experiments show that this action-based reasoning process significantly improves calibrated accuracy, reducing the Brier score by 18\% compared to a non-interactive baseline. To validate the faithfulness of the agent's explanations, we introduce a causal intervention method. By masking the visual evidence the agent chooses to use, we observe a measurable degradation in its performance ($Δ$Brier=+0.029), confirming that the evidence is integral to its decision-making process. Our work provides a practical framework for building AI systems with verifiable and faithful reasoning capabilities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_01425
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning to Seek Evidence: A Verifiable Reasoning Agent with Causal Faithfulness Analysis
Huang, Yuhang
Lin, Zekai
Zhong, Fan
Liu, Lei
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
I.2.6; I.2.10
Explanations for AI models in high-stakes domains like medicine often lack verifiability, which can hinder trust. To address this, we propose an interactive agent that produces explanations through an auditable sequence of actions. The agent learns a policy to strategically seek external visual evidence to support its diagnostic reasoning. This policy is optimized using reinforcement learning, resulting in a model that is both efficient and generalizable. Our experiments show that this action-based reasoning process significantly improves calibrated accuracy, reducing the Brier score by 18\% compared to a non-interactive baseline. To validate the faithfulness of the agent's explanations, we introduce a causal intervention method. By masking the visual evidence the agent chooses to use, we observe a measurable degradation in its performance ($Δ$Brier=+0.029), confirming that the evidence is integral to its decision-making process. Our work provides a practical framework for building AI systems with verifiable and faithful reasoning capabilities.
title Learning to Seek Evidence: A Verifiable Reasoning Agent with Causal Faithfulness Analysis
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
I.2.6; I.2.10
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01425