Lost in Interpretation: The Plausibility-Faithfulness Trade-off in Cross-Lingual Explanations

In three linesEnglish explanations for auditing multilingual LLMs mask a trade-off: higher span agreement with human rationales but weaker causal grounding in model predictions. Across 3 tasks and 5 languages, comprehensiveness degrades up to 5.7x in English-pivot conditions despite stable task accuracy. Authors recommend auditing in input language rather than English pivots.

Summary generated by Claude — human-verified