When Do Explanations Help In-Context Learning? A Comparative Study of Natural Language Explanation Types and Faithfulness

Natural language explanations (NLEs) are increasingly used as inputs, for example, as few-shot rationales that influence model behavior in in-context learning (ICL). However, it remains unclear how different types of NLEs compare in their effects on downstream model performance in explanation-augmented prompting. Therefore, we provide a comparative evaluation across six benchmarks and four instruction-tuned models, studying how NLE source (human-written when available, self-generated explanations, generated by an external LLM) and NLE selection (random vs faithfulness-based filtering) affect downstream utility of NLEs when used in ICL settings. Our extensive evaluation shows that, on classification-style benchmarks, adding NLEs to few-shot prompts often improves accuracy over few-shot prompting without explanations; among NLE sources, externally generated LLM-NLEs often provide strong downstream utility and remain competitive with human rationales where both are available, whereas self-NLEs are more sensitive to the selection strategy. On math reasoning, the effects are more model- and source-dependent. We further show that faithfulness-based selection of self-NLEs yields small average gains overall, but can improve or reduce performance depending on the metric, task, and model. Different faithfulness metrics can disagree substantially, affecting which self-NLE examples are selected and their downstream predictive utility. Robustness tests with randomly swapped and out-of-distribution rationales indicate partial robustness, suggesting that semantic alignment contributes to performance gains. Overall, our results provide insights for selecting and reporting explanations that influence model behavior in practical prompting pipelines.

All Explanations are Wrong, But Many Are Useful: Exploring the Rashomon Explanation Set with Large Language Models

Explaining machine-learning models is increasingly important for decision-making and consumer trust, yet it is widely believed to come at a cost: existing Explainable AI (XAI) methods suffer from a persistent accuracy-explainability trade-off. We argue that this trade-off is not fundamental, but an artifact of treating explanation and prediction as separate objectives; when properly coupled, they become complementary, so that equipping a model to explain itself improves, rather than degrades, its accuracy. We introduce the Rashomon Explanation paradigm, which builds a set of faithful, prediction-guiding explanations rather than a single one, and prove that this set is generally non-empty and that explanation fidelity bounds the performance of the models it guides. To explore this set, we propose RashomonLLM, an Explanation-Prediction-Reflection agentic workflow that generates explanations in natural language by iteratively aligning them with predictions, and we prove it converges and recovers the full set. Across customer-churn classification, clinical survival regression, and industrial click-through prediction on large-scale live-streaming logs, RashomonLLM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art prediction and XAI baselines on both accuracy and explanation quality, with gains driven by explanation fidelity and robust to distribution shifts, temporal splits, and seeds. Our framework thus advances business performance while laying the groundwork for consumer trust.

CIExplainer++: Generating Causal and Interpretable Explanations for Graph Neural Networks

Explainable Artificial Intelligence aims to make black-box models more trustworthy by presenting, in a human-understandable manner, the elements that lead to the model's output. This involves both (i) identifying components and connections with genuine causal influence on outputs and (ii) translating such structures into an interpretable representation. For the former, we introduce CIExplainer, a novel perturbation-based method grounded in causal inference for explaining Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). CIExplainer identifies the subgraph with the highest causal effects on GNN predictions using the Potential Outcome Framework. We evaluate and compare CIExplainer on various GNN architectures (GCN, GraphSAGE, GAT, GIN) and datasets. To bridge subgraph explanations with human interpretability, we further propose G2TeXplainer, a method that transforms causal subgraphs into natural language explanations that capture both feature-level and relational information.

Generative Explainability for Next-Generation Networks: LLM-Augmented XAI with Mutual Feature Interactions

As artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) models become integral to network operations, their lack of transparency poses a significant barrier to operator trust. Existing explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques often fail to bridge this gap for non-specialists, producing technical outputs that are difficult to translate into actionable insights. This paper presents a framework specifically designed to address this shortcoming. It leverages a moderately sized large language model (LLM) and extends beyond the standard use of SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) feature influence values. The framework employs a structured prompt enriched with mutual feature interaction data to generate human-understandable natural language explanations. To validate our framework, we performed an empirical evaluation on an optical quality of transmission (QoT) estimation use case with human evaluators. We collected independent performance evaluations from specialists, which showed a high inter-evaluator agreement. Compared to a state-of-the-art baseline that uses only SHAP feature influence values in a straightforward prompt, our approach improves the explanation usefulness and scope by 12.2% and 6.2%, while achieving 97.5% correctness.