arXiv:2611.14704v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) increasingly make consequential decisions and solve problems alongside humans, we must understand how models arrive at their conclusions. Understanding how an LLM behaves requires observing it across multiple inputs, yet free-text explanations such as chain-of-thought (CoT) are generated per instance and cannot be easily verified on new inputs. We propose {code explanations to address the mismatch in how LLM explanations are generated versus how they are evaluated: a program explains LLM behavior across a dataset of inputs, and its execution enables automatic verification. We define Consistency metric that measures the fraction of inputs on which the program reproduces the LLM's outputs, and use it to evaluate and select candidate programs. Across three open-source code-capable LLMs and eight tasks, we find that LLMs can produce highly consistent code explanations in several settings. Code explanations are also 6$\times$ to 100$\times$ shorter than CoT, and better align with model behavior in 9 out of 24 settings. However, consistency is significantly lower on tasks with more complex linguistic components, where generated programs reproduce model outputs no more frequently than an uninformative explanation baseline, and these programs often rely on longer hard-coded patterns. In experiments with Claude Opus 5.5, providing the model with consistency feedback and code execution improves explanation consistency across tasks, but consistency remains significantly lower on more complex tasks. Our findings establish executable code as a novel, verifiable, and compact approach to explaining LLM behavior and highlight verification feedback as a promising direction for improving explanation consistency. The code for this paper is at https://github.com/rajesh-lab/code-as-explanations.
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) increasingly make consequential decisions and solve problems alongside humans, we must understand how models arrive at their conclusions. Understanding how an LLM behaves requires observing it across multiple inputs, yet free-text explanations such as chain-of-thought (CoT) are generated per instance and cannot be easily verified on new inputs. We propose {code explanations to address the mismatch in how LLM explanations are generated versus how they are evaluated: a program explains LLM behavior across a dataset of inputs, and its execution enables automatic verification. We define Consistency metric that measures the fraction of inputs on which the program reproduces the LLM's outputs, and use it to evaluate and select candidate programs. Across three open-source code-capable LLMs and eight tasks, we find that LLMs can produce highly consistent code explanations in several settings. Code explanations are also 6$\times$ to 100$\times$ shorter than CoT, and better align with model behavior in 9 out of 24 settings. However, consistency is significantly lower on tasks with more complex linguistic components, where generated programs reproduce model outputs no more frequently than an uninformative explanation baseline, and these programs often rely on longer hard-coded patterns. In experiments with Claude Opus 5.5, providing the model with consistency feedback and code execution improves explanation consistency across tasks, but consistency remains significantly lower on more complex tasks. Our findings establish executable code as a novel, verifiable, and compact approach to explaining LLM behavior and highlight verification feedback as a promising direction for improving explanation consistency. The code for this paper is at https://github.com/rajesh-lab/code-as-explanations.
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