@inproceedings{zaman-srivastava-2025-causal,
    title = "A Causal Lens for Evaluating Faithfulness Metrics",
    author = "Zaman, Kerem  and
      Srivastava, Shashank",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-luhme/2025.emnlp-main.1496/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1496",
    pages = "29413--29437",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
    abstract = "Large Language Models (LLMs) offer natural language explanations as an alternative to feature attribution methods for model interpretability. However, despite their plausibility, they may not reflect the model{'}s truereasoning faithfully. While several faithfulness metrics have been proposed, they are often evaluated in isolation, making principled comparisons between them difficult. We present Causal Diagnosticity, a testbed framework for evaluating faithfulness metrics for natural language explanations. We use the concept of diagnosticity, and employ model-editing methods to generate faithful-unfaithful explanation pairs. Our benchmark includes four tasks: fact-checking, analogy, object counting, and multi-hop reasoning. We evaluate prominent faithfulness metrics, including post-hoc explanation and chain-of-thought methods. Diagnostic performance varies across tasks and models, with Filler Tokens performing best overall. Additionally, continuous metrics are generally more diagnostic than binary ones but can be sensitive to noise and model choice. Our results highlight the need for more robust faithfulness metrics."
}