Helena Vasconcelos

Yoonho Lee, Michelle S. Lam, Helena Vasconcelos et al.

The standard way to teach models is by feeding them lots of data. However, this approach often teaches models incorrect ideas because they pick up on misleading signals in the data. To prevent such misconceptions, we must necessarily provide additional information beyond the training data. Prior methods incorporate additional instance-level supervision, such as labels for misleading features or additional labels for debiased data. However, such strategies require a large amount of labeler effort. We hypothesize that people are good at providing textual feedback at the concept level, a capability that existing teaching frameworks do not leverage. We propose Clarify, a novel interface and method for interactively correcting model misconceptions. Through Clarify, users need only provide a short text description of a model's consistent failure patterns. Then, in an entirely automated way, we use such descriptions to improve the training process. Clarify is the first end-to-end system for user model correction. Our user studies show that non-expert users can successfully describe model misconceptions via Clarify, leading to increased worst-case performance in two datasets. We additionally conduct a case study on a large-scale image dataset, ImageNet, using Clarify to find and rectify 31 novel hard subpopulations.

Ziang Li, Manasi Ganti, Zixian Ma et al.

Large language models (LLMs) often generate natural language rationales -- free-form explanations that help improve performance on complex reasoning tasks and enhance interpretability for human users. However, evaluating these rationales remains challenging. While recent work has relied on binary preference judgments from humans or LLM judges, such evaluations are often opaque and coarse-grained, offering limited insight into what makes one rationale better than another. In this work, we rethink preference evaluation for LLM-generated rationales by asking: (1) What attributes define good rationales? (2) Can human preferences be explained by these attributes? (3) Can attribute-based evaluation overcome the limitations of binary comparisons? We identify a set of key rationale attributes from prior literature and assess them using automatic metrics, LLM judgments, and human annotations. We then analyze two standard human preference datasets MT Bench and Chatbot Arena using SHAP to identify which attributes best explain human preference outcomes. Finally, we re-evaluate model-generated rationales using attribute-specific ELO scores, revealing more nuanced model comparisons and insights. Our findings suggest that fine-grained attribute evaluations can better characterize rationale quality and guide future research toward more interpretable and reliable evaluation practices.