Task-Conditional Faithfulness Auditing of Multimodal LLMs for Grid Diagnosis

Abstract

Multimodal large language models (LLMs) can combine topology, measurements, and incident text for grid diagnosis, yet answer accuracy does not establish that task-appropriate evidence was used. This letter proposes a general framework in order to conduct task-conditional faithfulness audit. It compares self-reported reliance, intervention-derived behavioral reliance, and preregistered engineering importance. The framework first registers task-specific evidence requirements and compares them with self-reported reliance and behavioral changes under controlled modality ablations. To resolve detected discrepancies, we design an evidence-gated correction and re-audit mechanism that regenerates failed responses under evidence constraints and independently re-ablates them to verify improved grounding without performance loss. Case studies evaluate three differently scaled LLMs on IEEE 39- and 118-bus scenarios. These results validate the framework ability to detect, diagnose, and correct task-conditional faithfulness failures.