Zero-shot LLMs fail to beat baselines on stock prediction; explainability signals retain practical value
A new arXiv preprint evaluates zero-shot NLP pipelines for predicting short-term stock movements from financial news, finding that across multiple models and prediction horizons, zero-shot approaches consistently fail to outperform simple baselines, with especially weak performance on negative price movements. The authors introduce a multi-layered explainability framework linking predictions to token-, article-, and aggregate-level evidence, finding that explainability signals can reliably distinguish trustworthy from unreliable predictions even when accuracy is low. The work argues for a shift toward decision-support systems emphasizing transparency and uncertainty awareness rather than raw predictive accuracy.
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Forecasting Downstream LLM Performance With Token-Level Proxy Metrics
Researchers propose proxy metrics constructed from token-level statistics (entropy, top-k accuracy, expert token rank) drawn from a candidate model's next-token distribution over expert-written solutions, as a cheaper and more reliable alternative to cross-entropy loss or direct downstream evaluation. Across three settings—cross-family model selection, pretraining data selection, and training-time forecasting—the proxies consistently outperform baselines, achieving mean Spearman Rho of 0.81 vs. 0.36 for cross-entropy loss on model ranking, and reducing compute for data selection by roughly 10,000×. The method enables downstream performance extrapolation across an 18× compute horizon with roughly half the error of existing alternatives, suggesting expert trajectories are broadly useful signals throughout the model development lifecycle.
Explainability pipeline reveals divergent cues used by deepfake speech detectors
Researchers propose an audio-native explainability pipeline using Integrated Gradients on time-aligned self-supervised representations to localize decision evidence in deepfake speech detectors. Applied to three WavLM-based detectors (AASIST, CA-MHFA, SLS) on the ASVspoof 5 benchmark, the method reveals that despite similar performance, each detector relies on fundamentally different cues: environmental noise, phoneme artifacts, and word boundaries respectively. Findings are validated via causal masking experiments that confirm performance degrades when primary cues are removed. The work advances interpretability of audio deepfake detection, relevant to AI safety and media authenticity.
LLM-augmented XAI framework with mutual feature interactions for network operations
A new arXiv paper proposes a framework combining LLMs with SHAP-based explainability, augmented by mutual feature interaction data, to generate natural language explanations for AI/ML models used in network operations. The approach is validated on an optical quality-of-transmission estimation task with human evaluators, showing 12.2% and 6.2% improvements in explanation usefulness and scope over a SHAP-only baseline, with 97.5% correctness. The work targets the gap between technical XAI outputs and actionable insights for non-specialist network operators.
Human Decision-Making with Persuasive and Narrative LLM Explanations
A large-scale behavioral experiment evaluated how LLM-generated narrative explanations of varying persuasiveness affect human decision-making accuracy in classification tasks. Results showed that persuasiveness level did not meaningfully improve decision accuracy over a simple AI prediction alone, consistent with prior explainable AI research using feature importance methods. Narratives increased AI reliance regardless of whether the AI prediction was correct or incorrect, and more persuasive narratives may have slowed response times and reduced ability to discriminate correct from incorrect AI predictions. The study concludes that narrative explanations involve tradeoffs and warrant further investigation into when and how they should be deployed.
StakeBench: A Market-Commitment-Grounded Benchmark for Financial Language Understanding
StakeBench is a new evaluation framework linking 560,876 comments from 2,261 resolved prediction markets (Polymarket and Manifold) to verified trading positions, actions, and market-odds records, replacing human annotation with observable market behavior as supervision. Four diagnostic tasks test commitment detection, side identification, action anticipation, and collective odds projection, evaluated across 15 LLMs. Results reveal structural failures: models partially recover position-side signals (Directed Accuracy 0.506–0.599) but collapse on action anticipation and fail to beat naive baselines on odds projection. Notably, model scale shows no correlation with performance, and finance-domain fine-tuning does not improve revealed-side identification.
LEAF-X: Entropy-guided explainability framework for transformer-based ASR models
Researchers introduce LEAF-X (Listening with Entropy-guided Attention for Faithful explainability), a model-intrinsic XAI framework for transformer-based automatic speech recognition systems like Whisper. The method combines entropy-guided attention weighting, multi-layer attention rollout, and optional causal ablations to produce sparse token-to-frame attributions. Evaluations show 32% improved faithfulness and 35-39% stronger locality/sparsity compared to perturbation-based explainers and raw attention maps, enabling more auditable ASR.
Reverse Probing: Supervised Token-level Uncertainty Quantification for LLMs in Clinical Text
The paper introduces Reverse Probing, a novel uncertainty quantification framework designed specifically for clinical text summarization that estimates token-level uncertainty from pre-existing labeled summaries rather than sampling new outputs. It extracts uncertainty signals from four categories of internal model activations, treating text as a probe into the model's internal state. Evaluated on two expert-annotated clinical datasets, it outperforms eight adapted baselines on all metrics, achieving up to 4× higher AUPRC while reducing inference time and compute. Feature analysis identifies delta energy and neighborhood context as the most consistent predictors of uncertainty across models.
Stance Detection in Prediction Market Commentary via Counterfactual Augmentation and Market Context
This paper introduces the first stance detection system applied to prediction market commentary (Polymarket), addressing extreme class imbalance (8.7% anti-market comments) through LLM-driven counterfactual augmentation using the Anthropic API. RoBERTa-base is fine-tuned across a 4×3 ablation covering input configurations and augmentation doses. Key findings: market context is the dominant factor (raising 3-class Anti recall from 0.10 to 0.45), 50% synthetic augmentation is optimal, and full augmentation (100%) consistently degrades performance. Attention-based interpretability supports all three findings mechanistically.