WellDunn: On the Robustness and Explainability of Language Models and Large Language Models in Identifying Wellness Dimensions

Seyedali Mohammadi, Edward Raff, Jinendra Malekar, Vedant Palit, Francis Ferraro, Manas Gaur


Abstract
Language Models (LMs) are being proposed for mental health applications where the heightened risk of adverse outcomes means predictive performance may not be a sufficient litmus test of a model’s utility in clinical practice. A model that can be trusted for practice should have a correspondence between explanation and clinical determination, yet no prior research has examined the attention fidelity of these models and their effect on ground truth explanations. We introduce an evaluation design that focuses on the robustness and explainability of LMs in identifying Wellness Dimensions (WDs). We focus on two existing mental health and well-being datasets: (a) Multi-label Classification-based MultiWD, and (b) WellXplain for evaluating attention mechanism veracity against expert-labeled explanations. The labels are based on Halbert Dunn’s theory of wellness, which gives grounding to our evaluation. We reveal four surprising results about LMs/LLMs: (1) Despite their human-like capabilities, GPT-3.5/4 lag behind RoBERTa, and MedAlpaca, a fine-tuned LLM on WellXplain fails to deliver any remarkable improvements in performance or explanations. (2) Re-examining LMs’ predictions based on a confidence-oriented loss function reveals a significant performance drop. (3) Across all LMs/LLMs, the alignment between attention and explanations remains low, with LLMs scoring a dismal 0.0. (4) Most mental health-specific LMs/LLMs overlook domain-specific knowledge and undervalue explanations, causing these discrepancies. This study highlights the need for further research into their consistency and explanations in mental health and well-being.
Anthology ID:
2024.blackboxnlp-1.23
Volume:
Proceedings of the 7th BlackboxNLP Workshop: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, US
Editors:
Yonatan Belinkov, Najoung Kim, Jaap Jumelet, Hosein Mohebbi, Aaron Mueller, Hanjie Chen
Venue:
BlackboxNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
364–388
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.blackboxnlp-1.23
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Seyedali Mohammadi, Edward Raff, Jinendra Malekar, Vedant Palit, Francis Ferraro, and Manas Gaur. 2024. WellDunn: On the Robustness and Explainability of Language Models and Large Language Models in Identifying Wellness Dimensions. In Proceedings of the 7th BlackboxNLP Workshop: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP, pages 364–388, Miami, Florida, US. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
WellDunn: On the Robustness and Explainability of Language Models and Large Language Models in Identifying Wellness Dimensions (Mohammadi et al., BlackboxNLP 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.blackboxnlp-1.23.pdf