# IDEA: An Interpretable and Editable Decision-Making Framework for LLMs via Verbal-to-Numeric Calibration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.12573 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12573/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Language Models Don't Always Say What They Think: Unfaithful Explanations in Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04388/) (2023)
- [Concept Bottleneck Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04612/) (2020)
- [Can LLMs Express Their Uncertainty? An Empirical Evaluation of Confidence Elicitation in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13063/) (2023)
- [Just Ask for Calibration: Strategies for Eliciting Calibrated Confidence Scores from Language Models Fine-Tuned with Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14975/) (2023)
- [Language in a Bottle: Language Model Guided Concept Bottlenecks for Interpretable Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11158/) (2022)
- [Foundation Models for Decision Making: Problems, Methods, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04129/) (2023)
- [COM2SENSE: A Commonsense Reasoning Benchmark with Complementary Sentences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00969/) (2021)
- [AuroRA: Breaking Low-Rank Bottleneck of LoRA with Nonlinear Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18738/) (2025)
- [Generic Temporal Reasoning with Differential Analysis and Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10467/) (2022)
- [NeuReasoner: Towards Explainable, Controllable, and Unified Reasoning via Mixture-of-Neurons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02972/) (2026)
- [FoE: Forest of Errors Makes the First Solution the Best in Large Reasoning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02967/) (2026)
- [FACT-E: Causality-Inspired Evaluation for Trustworthy Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10693/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models are increasingly deployed for decision-making, yet their adoption in high-stakes domains remains limited by miscalibrated probabilities, unfaithful explanations, and inability to incorporate expert knowledge precisely. We propose IDEA, a framework that extracts LLM decision knowledge into an interpretable parametric model over semantically meaningful factors. Through joint learning of verbal-to-numerical mappings and decision parameters via EM, correlated sampling that preserves factor dependencies, and direct parameter editing with mathematical guarantees, IDEA produces calibrated probabilities while enabling quantitative human-AI collaboration. Experiments across five datasets show IDEA with Qwen-3-32B (78.6%) outperforms DeepSeek R1 (68.1%) and GPT-5.2 (77.9%), achieving perfect factor exclusion and exact calibration -- precision unattainable through prompting alone. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/leonbig/IDEA.