CoE: Chain-of-Explanation via Automatic Visual Concept Circuit Description and Polysemanticity Quantification

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Main Authors: Yu, Wenlong, Wang, Qilong, Liu, Chuang, Li, Dong, Hu, Qinghua
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Yu, Wenlong
Wang, Qilong
Liu, Chuang
Li, Dong
Hu, Qinghua
author_facet Yu, Wenlong
Wang, Qilong
Liu, Chuang
Li, Dong
Hu, Qinghua
contents Explainability is a critical factor influencing the wide deployment of deep vision models (DVMs). Concept-based post-hoc explanation methods can provide both global and local insights into model decisions. However, current methods in this field face challenges in that they are inflexible to automatically construct accurate and sufficient linguistic explanations for global concepts and local circuits. Particularly, the intrinsic polysemanticity in semantic Visual Concepts (VCs) impedes the interpretability of concepts and DVMs, which is underestimated severely. In this paper, we propose a Chain-of-Explanation (CoE) approach to address these issues. Specifically, CoE automates the decoding and description of VCs to construct global concept explanation datasets. Further, to alleviate the effect of polysemanticity on model explainability, we design a concept polysemanticity disentanglement and filtering mechanism to distinguish the most contextually relevant concept atoms. Besides, a Concept Polysemanticity Entropy (CPE), as a measure of model interpretability, is formulated to quantify the degree of concept uncertainty. The modeling of deterministic concepts is upgraded to uncertain concept atom distributions. Finally, CoE automatically enables linguistic local explanations of the decision-making process of DVMs by tracing the concept circuit. GPT-4o and human-based experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CPE and the superiority of CoE, achieving an average absolute improvement of 36% in terms of explainability scores.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_15234
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CoE: Chain-of-Explanation via Automatic Visual Concept Circuit Description and Polysemanticity Quantification
Yu, Wenlong
Wang, Qilong
Liu, Chuang
Li, Dong
Hu, Qinghua
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Explainability is a critical factor influencing the wide deployment of deep vision models (DVMs). Concept-based post-hoc explanation methods can provide both global and local insights into model decisions. However, current methods in this field face challenges in that they are inflexible to automatically construct accurate and sufficient linguistic explanations for global concepts and local circuits. Particularly, the intrinsic polysemanticity in semantic Visual Concepts (VCs) impedes the interpretability of concepts and DVMs, which is underestimated severely. In this paper, we propose a Chain-of-Explanation (CoE) approach to address these issues. Specifically, CoE automates the decoding and description of VCs to construct global concept explanation datasets. Further, to alleviate the effect of polysemanticity on model explainability, we design a concept polysemanticity disentanglement and filtering mechanism to distinguish the most contextually relevant concept atoms. Besides, a Concept Polysemanticity Entropy (CPE), as a measure of model interpretability, is formulated to quantify the degree of concept uncertainty. The modeling of deterministic concepts is upgraded to uncertain concept atom distributions. Finally, CoE automatically enables linguistic local explanations of the decision-making process of DVMs by tracing the concept circuit. GPT-4o and human-based experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CPE and the superiority of CoE, achieving an average absolute improvement of 36% in terms of explainability scores.
title CoE: Chain-of-Explanation via Automatic Visual Concept Circuit Description and Polysemanticity Quantification
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15234