Faithfulness Serum: Mitigating the Faithfulness Gap in Textual Explanations of LLM Decisions via Attribution Guidance

arXiv:2604.14325 · cs.CL, cs.AI · Submitted 2026-04-15 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL, cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-04-15

Updated: 2026-04-15

Comments: 24 pages, multiple figures (e.g., at least 6 main figures), includes experiments across several benchmarks (MMLU, CommonsenseQA, SciQ, ARC, OpenBookQA); code available on GitHub

Journal ref: Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6622-6645, 2026

DOI: 10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.300

Code: https://github.com/Bar-A-94/FaithfulnessSerum

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Benchmark — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Explainability — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Large Language Models (LLMs) — 1× in this paper · explained in 8 episodes

Sources

• Quantifying Attention Flow in Transformers
• AttnLRP: Attention-Aware Layer-Wise Relevance Propagation for Transformers
• Faithfulness Tests for Natural Language Explanations
• Revisiting LRP: Positional Attribution as the Missing Ingredient for Transformer Explainability
• LLMs for Explainable AI: A Comprehensive Survey
• Transformer Interpretability Beyond Attention Visualization
• Reasoning Models Don't Always Say What They Think
• FaithLM: Towards Faithful Explanations for Large Language Models
• Sparse Autoencoders Find Highly Interpretable Features in Language Models
• Opportunities and Challenges in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): A Survey
• The Llama 3 Herd of Models
• DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning
• Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding
• Can Large Language Models Explain Themselves? A Study of LLM-Generated Self-Explanations
• OpenAI o1 System Card
• Learning the Difference that Makes a Difference with Counterfactually-Augmented Data
• Are self-explanations from Large Language Models faithful?
• GPT-4 Technical Report
• GPT-4o System Card
• On Measuring Faithfulness or Self-consistency of Natural Language Explanations

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