Compared to What? Baselines and Metrics for Counterfactual Prompting

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of baseline controls in counterfactual prompting evaluations, demonstrating that many observed effects are indistinguishable from general model sensitivity, and proposes a statistical framework for more accurate effect measurement.

Contribution

It introduces a framework comparing targeted interventions to paraphrasing baselines, improving the robustness of effect attribution in counterfactual prompting evaluations.

Findings

Many observed effects are statistically indistinguishable from baseline paraphrasing.

The proposed framework reduces false attribution of sensitivity to specific factors.

Per-sample metrics outperform aggregate metrics in detecting true effects.

Abstract

Counterfactual prompting (i.e., perturbing a single factor and measuring output change) is widely used to evaluate things like LLM bias and CoT faithfulness. But in this work we argue that observed effects cannot be attributed to the targeted factor without accounting for baseline ``meaning-preserving'' modifications to text that establish general model sensitivity. This is because every counterfactual edit is a compound treatment that bundles the variable of interest with incidental surface-form variation; this violates treatment variation irrelevance. We observe prediction flip rates on MedQA of 14.9% when we surgically change patient gender. However, this is statistically indistinguishable from the flip rates induced by simply paraphrasing inputs (14.1%). In this case, it would therefore be unwarranted to conclude that the LLM is especially sensitive to patient gender. To account for this and robustly measure the effects of targeted interventions, we propose a framework in which we compare (via statistical testing) differences observed under target interventions to those induced by paraphrasing inputs. We then use this framework to revisit a analysis done on the MedPerturb dataset, which reported evidence of model sensitivity to patient demographics and stylistic cues. We find that these effects largely dissipate when we account for general model sensitivity, with only 5 of 120 tests reaching statistical significance. Applying the same framework to occupational biography classification, we detect clearly significant directional gender bias, showing that the framework identifies real directional effects even when they are small. We evaluate a range of metrics -- aggregate, per-sample distributional, and regression -- and find that per-sample metrics are dramatically more powerful than aggregate metrics and regression powerfully and uniquely characterizes effect direction and magnitude.