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Hauptverfasser: Debole, Nicola, Barbiero, Pietro, Giannini, Francesco, Passerini, Andrea, Teso, Stefano, Marconato, Emanuele
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19774
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author Debole, Nicola
Barbiero, Pietro
Giannini, Francesco
Passerini, Andrea
Teso, Stefano
Marconato, Emanuele
author_facet Debole, Nicola
Barbiero, Pietro
Giannini, Francesco
Passerini, Andrea
Teso, Stefano
Marconato, Emanuele
contents Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) are neural networks designed to conjoin high performance with ante-hoc interpretability. CBMs work by first mapping inputs (e.g., images) to high-level concepts (e.g., visible objects and their properties) and then use these to solve a downstream task (e.g., tagging or scoring an image) in an interpretable manner. Their performance and interpretability, however, hinge on the quality of the concepts they learn. The go-to strategy for ensuring good quality concepts is to leverage expert annotations, which are expensive to collect and seldom available in applications. Researchers have recently addressed this issue by introducing "VLM-CBM" architectures that replace manual annotations with weak supervision from foundation models. It is however unclear what is the impact of doing so on the quality of the learned concepts. To answer this question, we put state-of-the-art VLM-CBMs to the test, analyzing their learned concepts empirically using a selection of significant metrics. Our results show that, depending on the task, VLM supervision can sensibly differ from expert annotations, and that concept accuracy and quality are not strongly correlated. Our code is available at https://github.com/debryu/CQA.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_19774
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle If Concept Bottlenecks are the Question, are Foundation Models the Answer?
Debole, Nicola
Barbiero, Pietro
Giannini, Francesco
Passerini, Andrea
Teso, Stefano
Marconato, Emanuele
Machine Learning
Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) are neural networks designed to conjoin high performance with ante-hoc interpretability. CBMs work by first mapping inputs (e.g., images) to high-level concepts (e.g., visible objects and their properties) and then use these to solve a downstream task (e.g., tagging or scoring an image) in an interpretable manner. Their performance and interpretability, however, hinge on the quality of the concepts they learn. The go-to strategy for ensuring good quality concepts is to leverage expert annotations, which are expensive to collect and seldom available in applications. Researchers have recently addressed this issue by introducing "VLM-CBM" architectures that replace manual annotations with weak supervision from foundation models. It is however unclear what is the impact of doing so on the quality of the learned concepts. To answer this question, we put state-of-the-art VLM-CBMs to the test, analyzing their learned concepts empirically using a selection of significant metrics. Our results show that, depending on the task, VLM supervision can sensibly differ from expert annotations, and that concept accuracy and quality are not strongly correlated. Our code is available at https://github.com/debryu/CQA.
title If Concept Bottlenecks are the Question, are Foundation Models the Answer?
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19774