The Impact of Concept Explanations and Interventions on Human-Machine Collaboration

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Furby, Jack, Cunnington, Dan, Braines, Dave, Preece, Alun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Furby, Jack
Cunnington, Dan
Braines, Dave
Preece, Alun
author_facet Furby, Jack
Cunnington, Dan
Braines, Dave
Preece, Alun
contents Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are often considered black boxes due to their opaque decision-making processes. To reduce their opacity Concept Models (CMs), such as Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), were introduced to predict human-defined concepts as an intermediate step before predicting task labels. This enhances the interpretability of DNNs. In a human-machine setting greater interpretability enables humans to improve their understanding and build trust in a DNN. In the introduction of CBMs, the models demonstrated increased task accuracy as incorrect concept predictions were replaced with their ground truth values, known as intervening on the concept predictions. In a collaborative setting, if the model task accuracy improves from interventions, trust in a model and the human-machine task accuracy may increase. However, the result showing an increase in model task accuracy was produced without human evaluation and thus it remains unknown if the findings can be applied in a collaborative setting. In this paper, we ran the first human studies using CBMs to evaluate their human interaction in collaborative task settings. Our findings show that CBMs improve interpretability compared to standard DNNs, leading to increased human-machine alignment. However, this increased alignment did not translate to a significant increase in task accuracy. Understanding the model's decision-making process required multiple interactions, and misalignment between the model's and human decision-making processes could undermine interpretability and model effectiveness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_00015
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Impact of Concept Explanations and Interventions on Human-Machine Collaboration
Furby, Jack
Cunnington, Dan
Braines, Dave
Preece, Alun
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are often considered black boxes due to their opaque decision-making processes. To reduce their opacity Concept Models (CMs), such as Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), were introduced to predict human-defined concepts as an intermediate step before predicting task labels. This enhances the interpretability of DNNs. In a human-machine setting greater interpretability enables humans to improve their understanding and build trust in a DNN. In the introduction of CBMs, the models demonstrated increased task accuracy as incorrect concept predictions were replaced with their ground truth values, known as intervening on the concept predictions. In a collaborative setting, if the model task accuracy improves from interventions, trust in a model and the human-machine task accuracy may increase. However, the result showing an increase in model task accuracy was produced without human evaluation and thus it remains unknown if the findings can be applied in a collaborative setting. In this paper, we ran the first human studies using CBMs to evaluate their human interaction in collaborative task settings. Our findings show that CBMs improve interpretability compared to standard DNNs, leading to increased human-machine alignment. However, this increased alignment did not translate to a significant increase in task accuracy. Understanding the model's decision-making process required multiple interactions, and misalignment between the model's and human decision-making processes could undermine interpretability and model effectiveness.
title The Impact of Concept Explanations and Interventions on Human-Machine Collaboration
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.00015