2025.findings-acl.1092@ACL

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#1 Can Input Attributions Explain Inductive Reasoning in In-Context Learning? [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Mengyu Ye, Tatsuki Kuribayashi, Goro Kobayashi, Jun Suzuki

Interpreting the internal process of neural models has long been a challenge. This challenge remains relevant in the era of large language models (LLMs) and in-context learning (ICL); for example, ICL poses a new issue of interpreting which example in the few-shot examples contributed to identifying/solving the task. To this end, in this paper, we design synthetic diagnostic tasks of inductive reasoning, inspired by the generalization tests in linguistics; here, most in-context examples are ambiguous w.r.t. their underlying rule, and one critical example disambiguates the task demonstrated. The question is whether conventional input attribution (IA) methods can track such a reasoning process, i.e., identify the influential example, in ICL. Our experiments provide several practical findings; for example, a certain simple IA method works the best, and the larger the model, the generally harder it is to interpret the ICL with gradient-based IA methods.

Subject: ACL.2025 - Findings