From XAI to Stories: A Factorial Study of LLM-Generated Explanation Quality

Explainable AI (XAI) methods like SHAP and LIME produce numerical feature attributions that remain inaccessible to non expert users. Prior work has shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) can transform these outputs into natural language explanations (NLEs), but it remains unclear which factors contribute to high-quality explanations. We present a systematic factorial study investigating how Forecasting model choice, XAI method, LLM selection, and prompting strategy affect NLE quality. Our design spans four models (XGBoost (XGB), Random Forest (RF), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), and SARIMAX - comparing black-box Machine-Learning (ML) against classical time-series approaches), three XAI conditions (SHAP, LIME, and a no-XAI baseline), three LLMs (GPT-4o, Llama-3-8B, DeepSeek-R1), and eight prompting strategies. Using G-Eval, an LLM-as-a-judge evaluation method, with dual LLM judges and four evaluation criteria, we evaluate 660 explanations for time-series forecasting. Our results suggest that: (1) XAI provides only small improvements over no-XAI baselines, and only for expert audiences; (2) LLM choice dominates all other factors, with DeepSeek-R1 outperforming GPT-4o and Llama-3; (3) we observe an interpretability paradox: in our setting, SARIMAX yielded lower NLE quality than ML models despite higher prediction accuracy; (4) zero-shot prompting is competitive with self-consistency at 7-times lower cost; and (5) chain-of-thought hurts rather than helps.

Towards Desiderata-Driven Design of Visual Counterfactual Explainers

Visual counterfactual explainers (VCEs) are a straightforward and promising approach to enhancing the transparency of image classifiers. VCEs complement other types of explanations, such as feature attribution, by revealing the specific data transformations to which a machine learning model responds most strongly. In this paper, we argue that existing VCEs focus too narrowly on optimizing sample quality or change minimality; they fail to consider the more holistic desiderata for an explanation, such as fidelity, understandability, and sufficiency. To address this shortcoming, we explore new mechanisms for counterfactual generation and investigate how they can help fulfill these desiderata. We combine these mechanisms into a novel 'smooth counterfactual explorer' (SCE) algorithm and demonstrate its effectiveness through systematic evaluations on synthetic and real data.

Towards Fixing Clever-Hans Predictors with Counterfactual Knowledge Distillation

This paper introduces a novel technique called counterfactual knowledge distillation (CFKD) to detect and remove reliance on confounders in deep learning models with the help of human expert feedback. Confounders are spurious features that models tend to rely on, which can result in unexpected errors in regulated or safety-critical domains. The paper highlights the benefit of CFKD in such domains and shows some advantages of counterfactual explanations over other types of explanations. We propose an experiment scheme to quantitatively evaluate the success of CFKD and different teachers that can give feedback to the model. We also introduce a new metric that is better correlated with true test performance than validation accuracy. The paper demonstrates the effectiveness of CFKD on synthetically augmented datasets and on real-world histopathological datasets.

Disentangled Explanations of Neural Network Predictions by Finding Relevant Subspaces

Explainable AI transforms opaque decision strategies of ML models into explanations that are interpretable by the user, for example, identifying the contribution of each input feature to the prediction at hand. Such explanations, however, entangle the potentially multiple factors that enter into the overall complex decision strategy. We propose to disentangle explanations by finding relevant subspaces in activation space that can be mapped to more abstract human-understandable concepts and enable a joint attribution on concepts and input features. To automatically extract the desired representation, we propose new subspace analysis formulations that extend the principle of PCA and subspace analysis to explanations. These novel analyses, which we call principal relevant component analysis (PRCA) and disentangled relevant subspace analysis (DRSA), optimize relevance of projected activations rather than the more traditional variance or kurtosis. This enables a much stronger focus on subspaces that are truly relevant for the prediction and the explanation, in particular, ignoring activations or concepts to which the prediction model is invariant. Our approach is general enough to work alongside common attribution techniques such as Shapley Value, Integrated Gradients, or LRP. Our proposed methods show to be practically useful and compare favorably to the state of the art as demonstrated on benchmarks and three use cases.