Walking the Web of Concept-Class Relationships in Incrementally Trained Interpretable Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Agrawal, Susmit, Vemuri, Deepika, P, Sri Siddarth Chakaravarthy, Balasubramanian, Vineeth N.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Agrawal, Susmit
Vemuri, Deepika
P, Sri Siddarth Chakaravarthy
Balasubramanian, Vineeth N.
author_facet Agrawal, Susmit
Vemuri, Deepika
P, Sri Siddarth Chakaravarthy
Balasubramanian, Vineeth N.
contents Concept-based methods have emerged as a promising direction to develop interpretable neural networks in standard supervised settings. However, most works that study them in incremental settings assume either a static concept set across all experiences or assume that each experience relies on a distinct set of concepts. In this work, we study concept-based models in a more realistic, dynamic setting where new classes may rely on older concepts in addition to introducing new concepts themselves. We show that concepts and classes form a complex web of relationships, which is susceptible to degradation and needs to be preserved and augmented across experiences. We introduce new metrics to show that existing concept-based models cannot preserve these relationships even when trained using methods to prevent catastrophic forgetting, since they cannot handle forgetting at concept, class, and concept-class relationship levels simultaneously. To address these issues, we propose a novel method - MuCIL - that uses multimodal concepts to perform classification without increasing the number of trainable parameters across experiences. The multimodal concepts are aligned to concepts provided in natural language, making them interpretable by design. Through extensive experimentation, we show that our approach obtains state-of-the-art classification performance compared to other concept-based models, achieving over 2$\times$ the classification performance in some cases. We also study the ability of our model to perform interventions on concepts, and show that it can localize visual concepts in input images, providing post-hoc interpretations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_20393
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Walking the Web of Concept-Class Relationships in Incrementally Trained Interpretable Models
Agrawal, Susmit
Vemuri, Deepika
P, Sri Siddarth Chakaravarthy
Balasubramanian, Vineeth N.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Concept-based methods have emerged as a promising direction to develop interpretable neural networks in standard supervised settings. However, most works that study them in incremental settings assume either a static concept set across all experiences or assume that each experience relies on a distinct set of concepts. In this work, we study concept-based models in a more realistic, dynamic setting where new classes may rely on older concepts in addition to introducing new concepts themselves. We show that concepts and classes form a complex web of relationships, which is susceptible to degradation and needs to be preserved and augmented across experiences. We introduce new metrics to show that existing concept-based models cannot preserve these relationships even when trained using methods to prevent catastrophic forgetting, since they cannot handle forgetting at concept, class, and concept-class relationship levels simultaneously. To address these issues, we propose a novel method - MuCIL - that uses multimodal concepts to perform classification without increasing the number of trainable parameters across experiences. The multimodal concepts are aligned to concepts provided in natural language, making them interpretable by design. Through extensive experimentation, we show that our approach obtains state-of-the-art classification performance compared to other concept-based models, achieving over 2$\times$ the classification performance in some cases. We also study the ability of our model to perform interventions on concepts, and show that it can localize visual concepts in input images, providing post-hoc interpretations.
title Walking the Web of Concept-Class Relationships in Incrementally Trained Interpretable Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20393