Stable Vision Concept Transformers for Medical Diagnosis

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Hu, Lijie, Lai, Songning, Hua, Yuan, Yang, Shu, Zhang, Jingfeng, Wang, Di
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Hu, Lijie
Lai, Songning
Hua, Yuan
Yang, Shu
Zhang, Jingfeng
Wang, Di
author_facet Hu, Lijie
Lai, Songning
Hua, Yuan
Yang, Shu
Zhang, Jingfeng
Wang, Di
contents Transparency is a paramount concern in the medical field, prompting researchers to delve into the realm of explainable AI (XAI). Among these XAI methods, Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) aim to restrict the model's latent space to human-understandable high-level concepts by generating a conceptual layer for extracting conceptual features, which has drawn much attention recently. However, existing methods rely solely on concept features to determine the model's predictions, which overlook the intrinsic feature embeddings within medical images. To address this utility gap between the original models and concept-based models, we propose Vision Concept Transformer (VCT). Furthermore, despite their benefits, CBMs have been found to negatively impact model performance and fail to provide stable explanations when faced with input perturbations, which limits their application in the medical field. To address this faithfulness issue, this paper further proposes the Stable Vision Concept Transformer (SVCT) based on VCT, which leverages the vision transformer (ViT) as its backbone and incorporates a conceptual layer. SVCT employs conceptual features to enhance decision-making capabilities by fusing them with image features and ensures model faithfulness through the integration of Denoised Diffusion Smoothing. Comprehensive experiments on four medical datasets demonstrate that our VCT and SVCT maintain accuracy while remaining interpretable compared to baselines. Furthermore, even when subjected to perturbations, our SVCT model consistently provides faithful explanations, thus meeting the needs of the medical field.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_05286
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Stable Vision Concept Transformers for Medical Diagnosis
Hu, Lijie
Lai, Songning
Hua, Yuan
Yang, Shu
Zhang, Jingfeng
Wang, Di
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Transparency is a paramount concern in the medical field, prompting researchers to delve into the realm of explainable AI (XAI). Among these XAI methods, Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) aim to restrict the model's latent space to human-understandable high-level concepts by generating a conceptual layer for extracting conceptual features, which has drawn much attention recently. However, existing methods rely solely on concept features to determine the model's predictions, which overlook the intrinsic feature embeddings within medical images. To address this utility gap between the original models and concept-based models, we propose Vision Concept Transformer (VCT). Furthermore, despite their benefits, CBMs have been found to negatively impact model performance and fail to provide stable explanations when faced with input perturbations, which limits their application in the medical field. To address this faithfulness issue, this paper further proposes the Stable Vision Concept Transformer (SVCT) based on VCT, which leverages the vision transformer (ViT) as its backbone and incorporates a conceptual layer. SVCT employs conceptual features to enhance decision-making capabilities by fusing them with image features and ensures model faithfulness through the integration of Denoised Diffusion Smoothing. Comprehensive experiments on four medical datasets demonstrate that our VCT and SVCT maintain accuracy while remaining interpretable compared to baselines. Furthermore, even when subjected to perturbations, our SVCT model consistently provides faithful explanations, thus meeting the needs of the medical field.
title Stable Vision Concept Transformers for Medical Diagnosis
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05286