Towards Transparent AI: A Survey on Explainable Large Language Models
read the original abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have played a pivotal role in advancing Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, despite their achievements, LLMs often struggle to explain their decision-making processes, making them a 'black box' and presenting a substantial challenge to explainability. This lack of transparency poses a significant obstacle to the adoption of LLMs in high-stakes domain applications, where interpretability is particularly essential. To overcome these limitations, researchers have developed various explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods that provide human-interpretable explanations for LLMs. However, a systematic understanding of these methods remains limited. To address this gap, this survey provides a comprehensive review of explainability techniques by categorizing XAI methods based on the underlying transformer architectures of LLMs: encoder-only, decoder-only, and encoder-decoder models. Then these techniques are examined in terms of their evaluation for assessing explainability, and the survey further explores how these explanations are leveraged in practical applications. Finally, it discusses available resources, ongoing research challenges, and future directions, aiming to guide continued efforts toward developing transparent and responsible LLMs.
This paper has not been read by Pith yet.
Forward citations
Cited by 7 Pith papers
-
An Open-Source Benchmark and Baseline for Multi-temporal Referring Segmentation
Introduces MTRS task, MTRefSeg-21K benchmark of 21K image-text-mask triplets, and MTRefSeg-R1 LVLM baseline that outperforms standard models via two-stage change-aware training.
-
Decision-Aware Attention Propagation for Vision Transformer Explainability
DAP improves ViT attribution maps by injecting decision-relevant gradients into attention propagation, producing more class-sensitive and faithful explanations than standard attention rollout.
-
Hessian-Enhanced Token Attribution (HETA): Interpreting Autoregressive LLMs
HETA is a new attribution framework for decoder-only LLMs that combines semantic transition vectors, Hessian-based sensitivity scores, and KL divergence to produce more faithful and human-aligned token attributions th...
-
Multi-agent Self-triage System with Medical Flowcharts
A multi-agent conversational system using AMA flowcharts achieves 95.29% top-3 retrieval accuracy and 99.10% navigation accuracy on large synthetic medical conversation datasets.
-
Mitigating Hallucination on Hallucination in RAG via Ensemble Voting
VOTE-RAG applies retrieval voting across diverse queries and response voting across independent generations to mitigate hallucination-on-hallucination in RAG, matching or exceeding complex baselines on six benchmarks ...
-
Beyond Explainable AI (XAI): An Overdue Paradigm Shift and Post-XAI Research Directions
Current XAI methods for DNNs and LLMs rest on paradoxes and false assumptions that demand a paradigm shift to verification protocols, scientific foundations, context-aware design, and faithful model analysis rather th...
-
Toward Human-Centered Multi-Agent Systems: Integrating Cognition, Culture, Values, and Cooperation in AI Agents
A literature survey across cognitive science, sociolinguistics, and AI alignment that identifies the absence of unified frameworks for embedding cognition, culture, values, and cooperation into multi-agent LLM systems...
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.