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        <title>Are self-explanations from Large Language Models faithful?</title>
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    <abstract>Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at many tasks and will even explain their reasoning, so-called self-explanations. However, convincing and wrong self-explanations can lead to unsupported confidence in LLMs, thus increasing risk. Therefore, it’s important to measure if self-explanations truly reflect the model’s behavior. Such a measure is called interpretability-faithfulness and is challenging to perform since the ground truth is inaccessible, and many LLMs only have an inference API. To address this, we propose employing self-consistency checks to measure faithfulness. For example, if an LLM says a set of words is important for making a prediction, then it should not be able to make its prediction without these words. While self-consistency checks are a common approach to faithfulness, they have not previously been successfully applied to LLM self-explanations for counterfactual, feature attribution, and redaction explanations. Our results demonstrate that faithfulness is explanation, model, and task-dependent, showing self-explanations should not be trusted in general. For example, with sentiment classification, counterfactuals are more faithful for Llama2, feature attribution for Mistral, and redaction for Falcon 40B.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Are self-explanations from Large Language Models faithful?
%A Madsen, Andreas
%A Chandar, Sarath
%A Reddy, Siva
%Y Ku, Lun-Wei
%Y Martins, Andre
%Y Srikumar, Vivek
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
%D 2024
%8 August
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
%F madsen-etal-2024-self
%X Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at many tasks and will even explain their reasoning, so-called self-explanations. However, convincing and wrong self-explanations can lead to unsupported confidence in LLMs, thus increasing risk. Therefore, it’s important to measure if self-explanations truly reflect the model’s behavior. Such a measure is called interpretability-faithfulness and is challenging to perform since the ground truth is inaccessible, and many LLMs only have an inference API. To address this, we propose employing self-consistency checks to measure faithfulness. For example, if an LLM says a set of words is important for making a prediction, then it should not be able to make its prediction without these words. While self-consistency checks are a common approach to faithfulness, they have not previously been successfully applied to LLM self-explanations for counterfactual, feature attribution, and redaction explanations. Our results demonstrate that faithfulness is explanation, model, and task-dependent, showing self-explanations should not be trusted in general. For example, with sentiment classification, counterfactuals are more faithful for Llama2, feature attribution for Mistral, and redaction for Falcon 40B.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.19
%P 295-337

Markdown (Informal)

[Are self-explanations from Large Language Models faithful?](https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.19) (Madsen et al., Findings 2024)

• Are self-explanations from Large Language Models faithful? (Madsen et al., Findings 2024)

ACL

• Andreas Madsen, Sarath Chandar, and Siva Reddy. 2024. Are self-explanations from Large Language Models faithful?. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 295–337, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.