Papers for

career advisors

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Generative AI systems show users how they reach decisions

Visible Reasoning: User-Facing Decision Transparency for Generative AI Systems

Abstract: Across multiple waves of computing, public trust in new technology has followed the emergence of governance mechanisms that made dominant risks legible and manageable. Generative AI shifts this pattern: these systems synthesize across heterogeneous sources, and users increasingly experience them as reasoning systems. The central question changes from "did it perform correctly?" to "can we trust how it arrived at its conclusion?" This paper introduces Filtered Decision Logs (FDLs), a user-facing transparency mechanism that makes decision formation visible without exposing raw chain-of-thought. FDLs pair each response with (i) a concise decision rationale, (ii) influence-ordered supporting data points derived from tool outputs, and (iii) relevance indicators showing which sources most shaped the conclusion. To operationalize evidence selection, we propose a trace-based method that reconstructs observability telemetry into a provenance tree and ranks evidence using four deterministic semantic and structural signals - Final Answer Similarity, Average Relevancy, Persistence, and Structural Proximity - combined via adaptive weighted scoring. We demonstrate FDLs across three domains: career advising (5 tools), investment analysis (4 tools), and travel planning (4 tools). In a formative evaluation with 50 participants (25 students, 25 working professionals in AI development), 92% rated the influence-ranked evidence as helpful for understanding and trusting the system's recommendation. Counterfactual tool-removal experiments confirm that removing the top-ranked source changes the answer more than removing a low-ranked source, validating that the ranking tracks decision dependence. We conclude that evidence-ranked transparency helps users identify misleading signals and missing context, enabling more confident acceptance, correction, or re-run of system decisions.

Mon 26 OctHuman-Computer Interaction
The gist
Generative AI systems can be hard to trust because users don’t always know how the AI got to its answers. The authors created Filtered Decision Logs (FDLs) to explain AI decisions in a simple way without overwhelming details. FDLs show why the AI made a decision, highlight the most important data sources it used, and rank their influence. They tested this approach in jobs advice, investing, and travel planning, finding users understood and trusted the AI better with these explanations.
Open → 2610.35483v1