Large language models have the potential to generate explanations for their own predictions in a variety of styles based on user instructions. Recent research has examined whether these self-explanations faithfully reflect the models’ actual behavior and has found that they often lack faithfulness. However, the question of how to improve faithfulness remains underexplored. Moreover, because different explanation styles have superficially distinct characteristics, it is unclear whether improvements observed in one style also arise when using other styles. This study analyzes the effects of training for faithful self-explanations and the extent to which these effects generalize, using three classification tasks and three explanation styles. We construct one-word constrained explanations that are likely to be faithful using a feature attribution method, and use these pseudo-faithful self-explanations for continual learning on instruction-tuned models. Our experiments demonstrate that training can improve self-explanation faithfulness across all classification tasks and explanation styles, and that these improvements also show signs of generalization to the multi-word settings and to unseen tasks. Furthermore, we find consistent cross-style generalization among three styles, suggesting that training may contribute to a broader improvement in faithful self-explanation ability.

As conventional topic models rely on word co-occurrence to infer latent topics, topic modeling for short texts has been a long-standing challenge. Large Language Models (LLMs) can potentially overcome this challenge by contextually learning the meanings of words via pretraining. In this paper, we study two approaches to using LLMs for topic modeling: parallel prompting and sequential prompting. Input length limitations prevent LLMs from processing many texts at once. However, an arbitrary number of texts can be handled by LLMs by splitting the texts into smaller subsets and processing them in parallel or sequentially. Our experimental results demonstrate that our methods can identify more coherent topics than existing ones while maintaining the diversity of the induced topics. Furthermore, we found that the inferred topics cover the input texts to some extent, while hallucinated topics are hardly generated.