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Main Authors: Benou, Itay, Riklin-Raviv, Tammy
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20134
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author Benou, Itay
Riklin-Raviv, Tammy
author_facet Benou, Itay
Riklin-Raviv, Tammy
contents Modern deep neural networks have now reached human-level performance across a variety of tasks. However, unlike humans they lack the ability to explain their decisions by showing where and telling what concepts guided them. In this work, we present a unified framework for transforming any vision neural network into a spatially and conceptually interpretable model. We introduce a spatially-aware concept bottleneck layer that projects "black-box" features of pre-trained backbone models into interpretable concept maps, without requiring human labels. By training a classification layer over this bottleneck, we obtain a self-explaining model that articulates which concepts most influenced its prediction, along with heatmaps that ground them in the input image. Accordingly, we name this method "Spatially-Aware and Label-Free Concept Bottleneck Model" (SALF-CBM). Our results show that the proposed SALF-CBM: (1) Outperforms non-spatial CBM methods, as well as the original backbone, on a variety of classification tasks; (2) Produces high-quality spatial explanations, outperforming widely used heatmap-based methods on a zero-shot segmentation task; (3) Facilitates model exploration and debugging, enabling users to query specific image regions and refine the model's decisions by locally editing its concept maps.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_20134
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Show and Tell: Visually Explainable Deep Neural Nets via Spatially-Aware Concept Bottleneck Models
Benou, Itay
Riklin-Raviv, Tammy
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Modern deep neural networks have now reached human-level performance across a variety of tasks. However, unlike humans they lack the ability to explain their decisions by showing where and telling what concepts guided them. In this work, we present a unified framework for transforming any vision neural network into a spatially and conceptually interpretable model. We introduce a spatially-aware concept bottleneck layer that projects "black-box" features of pre-trained backbone models into interpretable concept maps, without requiring human labels. By training a classification layer over this bottleneck, we obtain a self-explaining model that articulates which concepts most influenced its prediction, along with heatmaps that ground them in the input image. Accordingly, we name this method "Spatially-Aware and Label-Free Concept Bottleneck Model" (SALF-CBM). Our results show that the proposed SALF-CBM: (1) Outperforms non-spatial CBM methods, as well as the original backbone, on a variety of classification tasks; (2) Produces high-quality spatial explanations, outperforming widely used heatmap-based methods on a zero-shot segmentation task; (3) Facilitates model exploration and debugging, enabling users to query specific image regions and refine the model's decisions by locally editing its concept maps.
title Show and Tell: Visually Explainable Deep Neural Nets via Spatially-Aware Concept Bottleneck Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20134