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

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Original 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-written when available, self-generated explanations, generated by an external LLM) and NLE selection (random vs faithfulness-based filtering) affect downstream utility of NLEs when used in ICL settings. Our extensive evaluation shows that, on classification-style benchmarks, adding NLEs to few-shot prompts often improves accuracy over few-shot prompting without explanations; among NLE sources, externally generated LLM-NLEs often provide strong downstream utility and remain competitive with human rationales where both are available, whereas self-NLEs are more sensitive to the selection strategy. On math reasoning, the effects are more model- and source-dependent. We further show that faithfulness-based selection of self-NLEs yields small average gains overall, but can improve or reduce performance depending on the metric, task, and model. Different faithfulness metrics can disagree substantially, affecting which self-NLE examples are selected and their downstream predictive utility. Robustness tests with randomly swapped and out-of-distribution rationales indicate partial robustness, suggesting that semantic alignment contributes to performance gains. Overall, our results provide insights for selecting and reporting explanations that influence model behavior in practical prompting pipelines.

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