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

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.16627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 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-