SimXAI: A Simple Drop-in Layer Increases Interaction Quality and Understanding in Conversational XAI

Abstract:Conversational explainable AI (ConvXAI) agents often use GUS-style architectures with separate modules for intent recognition, dialogue management, and template-based response generation. While faithful to the underlying XAI methods, these pipelines are hard to adapt and often struggle with context-dependent follow-up questions. We present SimXAI, a lightweight LLM-centric conversational layer that replaces these modules with a single tool-calling LLM that bridges access to existing XAI resources. Rather than a standalone agent, SimXAI serves as a modular interface that enables conversational access to external XAI resources. We further introduce an evaluation suite for single- and multi-turn parsing, faithfulness, and contextualization. Across existing and new datasets, SimXAI achieves strong function-selection accuracy and high faithfulness while better handling context-dependent requests. In a user study replacing only the conversational layer of TalkToModel, a representative GUS-based agent, users completed tasks more accurately and in fewer turn. Overall, SimXAI improves GUS-based design while preserving faithfulness and improving conversational quality.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)

arXiv:2610.41856 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2610.41856v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.41856 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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