CBVLM: Training-free Explainable Concept-based Large Vision Language Models for Medical Image Classification
Fuente:
arXiv
Saved in:
| Main Authors: | , , , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| _version_ | 1866914076974645248 |
|---|---|
| author | Patrício, Cristiano Rio-Torto, Isabel Cardoso, Jaime S. Teixeira, Luís F. Neves, João C. |
| author_facet | Patrício, Cristiano Rio-Torto, Isabel Cardoso, Jaime S. Teixeira, Luís F. Neves, João C. |
| contents | The main challenges limiting the adoption of deep learning-based solutions in medical workflows are the availability of annotated data and the lack of interpretability of such systems. Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) tackle the latter by constraining the model output on a set of predefined and human-interpretable concepts. However, the increased interpretability achieved through these concept-based explanations implies a higher annotation burden. Moreover, if a new concept needs to be added, the whole system needs to be retrained. Inspired by the remarkable performance shown by Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) in few-shot settings, we propose a simple, yet effective, methodology, CBVLM, which tackles both of the aforementioned challenges. First, for each concept, we prompt the LVLM to answer if the concept is present in the input image. Then, we ask the LVLM to classify the image based on the previous concept predictions. Moreover, in both stages, we incorporate a retrieval module responsible for selecting the best examples for in-context learning. By grounding the final diagnosis on the predicted concepts, we ensure explainability, and by leveraging the few-shot capabilities of LVLMs, we drastically lower the annotation cost. We validate our approach with extensive experiments across four medical datasets and twelve LVLMs (both generic and medical) and show that CBVLM consistently outperforms CBMs and task-specific supervised methods without requiring any training and using just a few annotated examples. More information on our project page: https://cristianopatricio.github.io/CBVLM/. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_12266 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | CBVLM: Training-free Explainable Concept-based Large Vision Language Models for Medical Image Classification Patrício, Cristiano Rio-Torto, Isabel Cardoso, Jaime S. Teixeira, Luís F. Neves, João C. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language The main challenges limiting the adoption of deep learning-based solutions in medical workflows are the availability of annotated data and the lack of interpretability of such systems. Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) tackle the latter by constraining the model output on a set of predefined and human-interpretable concepts. However, the increased interpretability achieved through these concept-based explanations implies a higher annotation burden. Moreover, if a new concept needs to be added, the whole system needs to be retrained. Inspired by the remarkable performance shown by Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) in few-shot settings, we propose a simple, yet effective, methodology, CBVLM, which tackles both of the aforementioned challenges. First, for each concept, we prompt the LVLM to answer if the concept is present in the input image. Then, we ask the LVLM to classify the image based on the previous concept predictions. Moreover, in both stages, we incorporate a retrieval module responsible for selecting the best examples for in-context learning. By grounding the final diagnosis on the predicted concepts, we ensure explainability, and by leveraging the few-shot capabilities of LVLMs, we drastically lower the annotation cost. We validate our approach with extensive experiments across four medical datasets and twelve LVLMs (both generic and medical) and show that CBVLM consistently outperforms CBMs and task-specific supervised methods without requiring any training and using just a few annotated examples. More information on our project page: https://cristianopatricio.github.io/CBVLM/. |
| title | CBVLM: Training-free Explainable Concept-based Large Vision Language Models for Medical Image Classification |
| topic | Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.12266 |