Concept-Based Explanations

Image aesthetic assessment (IAA) aims to predict the aesthetic quality of images as perceived by humans. While recent IAA models achieve strong predictive performance, they offer little insight into the factors driving their predictions. Yet for users, understanding why an image is considered pleasing or not is as valuable as the score itself, motivating growing interest in interpretability within IAA. When humans evaluate aesthetics, they naturally rely on high-level cues to justify their judgments. Motivated by this observation, we propose an interpretable IAA framework grounded in human-understandable aesthetic concepts. We learn these concepts in an accessible manner, constructing a subspace that forms the foundation of an inherently interpretable model. To capture nuanced influences on aesthetic perception beyond explicit concepts, we introduce a simple yet effective residual predictor. Experiments on photographic and artistic datasets demonstrate that our method achieves competitive predictive performance while offering transparent, human-understandable aesthetic judgments.

Interpreting the internal reasoning of vision-language models is essential for deploying AI in safety-critical domains. Concept-based explainability provides a human-aligned lens by representing a model's behavior through semantically meaningful components. However, existing methods are largely restricted to images and overlook the cross-modal interactions. Text-image embeddings, such as those produced by CLIP, suffer from a modality gap, where visual and textual features follow distinct distributions, limiting interpretability. Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) offers a principled way to align features from different distributions, but has not been leveraged for multi-modal concept-level analysis. We show that the objectives of CCA and InfoNCE are closely related, such that optimizing CCA implicitly optimizes InfoNCE, providing a simple, training-free mechanism to enhance cross-modal alignment without affecting the pre-trained InfoNCE objective. Motivated by this observation, we couple concept-based explainability with CCA, introducing Concept CCA (CoCCA), a framework that aligns cross-modal embeddings while enabling interpretable concept decomposition. We further extend it and propose Sparse Concept CCA (SCoCCA), which enforces sparsity to produce more disentangled and discriminative concepts, facilitating improved activation, ablation, and semantic manipulation. Our approach generalizes concept-based explanations to multi-modal embeddings and achieves state-of-the-art performance in concept discovery, evidenced by reconstruction and manipulation tasks such as concept ablation.

The use of wearables in medicine and wellness, enabled by AI-based models, offers tremendous potential for real-time monitoring and interpretable event detection. Explainable AI (XAI) is required to assess what models have learned and build trust in model outputs, for patients, healthcare professionals, model developers, and domain experts alike. Explaining AI decisions made on time-series data recorded by wearables is especially challenging due to the data's complex nature and temporal dependencies. Too often, explainability using interpretable features leads to performance loss. We propose a novel XAI method that combines explanation spaces and concept-based explanations to explain AI predictions on time-series data. By using Inherently Interpretable Components (IICs), which encapsulate domain-specific, interpretable concepts within a custom explanation space, we preserve the performance of models trained on time series while achieving the interpretability of concept-based explanations based on extracted features. Furthermore, we define a domain-specific set of IICs for wearable-based health monitoring and demonstrate their usability in real applications, including state assessment and epileptic seizure detection.

VLMs have become increasingly proficient at a range of computer vision tasks, such as visual question answering and object detection. This includes increasingly strong capabilities in the domain of art, from analyzing artwork to generation of art. In an interdisciplinary collaboration between computer scientists and art historians, we characterize the mechanisms underlying VLMs' ability to predict artistic style and assess the extent to which they align with the criteria art historians use to reason about artistic style. We employ a latent-space decomposition approach to identify concepts that drive art style prediction and conduct quantitative evaluations, causal analysis and assessment by art historians. Our findings indicate that 73% of the extracted concepts are judged by art historians to exhibit a coherent and semantically meaningful visual feature and 90% of concepts used to predict style of a given artwork were judged relevant. In cases where an irrelevant concept was used to successfully predict style, art historians identified possible reasons for its success; for example, the model might "understand" a concept in more formal terms, such as dark/light contrasts.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) often degrade under distribution shifts because they rely on spurious correlations, such as background cues, rather than semantically meaningful features. Existing regularization methods, typically relying on simple foreground-background masks, which fail to capture the fine-grained semantic concepts that define an object (e.g., long beak'' and wings'' for a ``bird''). As a result, these methods provide limited robustness to distribution shifts. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel finetuning framework that steers model reasoning toward concept-level semantics. Our approach optimizes the model's internal relevance maps to align with spatially grounded concept masks. These masks are generated automatically, without manual annotation: class-relevant concepts are first proposed using an LLM-based, label-free method, and then segmented using a VLM. The finetuning objective aligns relevance with these concept regions while simultaneously suppressing focus on spurious background areas. Notably, this process requires only a minimal set of images and uses half of the dataset classes. Extensive experiments on five out-of-distribution benchmarks demonstrate that our method improves robustness across multiple ViT-based models. Furthermore, we show that the resulting relevance maps exhibit stronger alignment with semantic object parts, offering a scalable path toward more robust and interpretable vision models. Finally, we confirm that concept-guided masks provide more effective supervision for model robustness than conventional segmentation maps, supporting our central hypothesis.

Modern deep neural networks remain challenging to interpret due to the opacity of their latent representations, impeding model understanding, debugging, and debiasing. Concept Embedding Models (CEMs) address this by mapping inputs to human-interpretable concept representations from which tasks can be predicted. Yet, CEMs fail to represent inter-concept relationships and require concept annotations at different granularities during training, limiting their applicability. In this paper, we introduce Hierarchical Concept Embedding Models (HiCEMs), a new family of CEMs that explicitly model concept relationships through hierarchical structures. To enable HiCEMs in real-world settings, we propose Concept Splitting, a method for automatically discovering finer-grained sub-concepts from a pretrained CEM's embedding space without requiring additional annotations. This allows HiCEMs to generate fine-grained explanations from limited concept labels, reducing annotation burdens. Our evaluation across multiple datasets, including a user study and experiments on PseudoKitchens, a newly proposed concept-based dataset of 3D kitchen renders, demonstrates that (1) Concept Splitting discovers human-interpretable sub-concepts absent during training that can be used to train highly accurate HiCEMs, and (2) HiCEMs enable powerful test-time concept interventions at different granularities, leading to improved task accuracy.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have advanced applications in domains such as healthcare, autonomous systems, and scene understanding, yet the internal semantics of their hidden neurons remain poorly understood. Prior work introduced a Concept Induction-based framework for hidden neuron analysis and demonstrated its effectiveness on the ADE20K dataset. In this case study, we investigate whether the approach generalizes by applying it to the SUN2012 dataset, a large-scale scene recognition benchmark. Using the same workflow, we assign interpretable semantic labels to neurons and validate them through web-sourced images and statistical testing. Our findings confirm that the method transfers to SUN2012, showing its broader applicability.

Open-world object detection (OWOD) requires incrementally detecting known categories while reliably identifying unknown objects. Existing methods primarily focus on improving unknown recall, yet overlook interpretability, often leading to known-unknown confusion and reduced prediction reliability. This paper aims to make the entire OWOD framework interpretable, enabling the detector to truly "knowing the unknown". To this end, we propose a concept-driven InterPretable OWOD framework(IPOW) by introducing a Concept Decomposition Model (CDM) for OWOD, which explicitly decomposes the coupled RoI features in Faster R-CNN into discriminative, shared, and background concepts. Discriminative concepts identify the most discriminative features to enlarge the distances between known categories, while shared and background concepts, due to their strong generalization ability, can be readily transferred to detect unknown categories. Leveraging the interpretable framework, we identify that known-unknown confusion arises when unknown objects fall into the discriminative space of known classes. To address this, we propose Concept-Guided Rectification (CGR) to further resolve such confusion. Extensive experiments show that IPOW significantly improves unknown recall while mitigating confusion, and provides concept-level interpretability for both known and unknown predictions.

Radiology Report Generation (RRG) through Vision-Language Models (VLMs) promises to reduce documentation burden, improve reporting consistency, and accelerate clinical workflows. However, their clinical adoption remains limited by the lack of interpretability and the tendency to hallucinate findings misaligned with imaging evidence. Existing research typically treats interpretability and accuracy as separate objectives, with concept-based explainability techniques focusing primarily on transparency, while Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods targeting factual grounding through external retrieval. We present Concept-Enhanced Multimodal RAG (CEMRAG), a unified framework that decomposes visual representations into interpretable clinical concepts and integrates them with multimodal RAG. This approach exploits enriched contextual prompts for RRG, improving both interpretability and factual accuracy. Experiments on MIMIC-CXR and IU X-Ray across multiple VLM architectures, training regimes, and retrieval configurations demonstrate consistent improvements over both conventional RAG and concept-only baselines on clinical accuracy metrics and standard NLP measures. These results challenge the assumed trade-off between interpretability and performance, showing that transparent visual concepts can enhance rather than compromise diagnostic accuracy in medical VLMs. Our modular design decomposes interpretability into visual transparency and structured language model conditioning, providing a principled pathway toward clinically trustworthy AI-assisted radiology.

Time series extrinsic regression (TSER) refers to the task of predicting a continuous target variable from an input time series. It appears in many domains, including healthcare, finance, environmental monitoring, and engineering. In these settings, accurate predictions and trustworthy reasoning are both essential. Although state-of-the-art TSER models achieve strong predictive performance, they typically operate as black boxes, making it difficult to understand which temporal patterns drive their decisions. Post-hoc interpretability techniques, such as feature attribution, aim to to explain how the model arrives at its predictions, but often produce coarse, noisy, or unstable explanations. Recently, inherently interpretable approaches based on concepts, additive decompositions, or symbolic regression, have emerged as promising alternatives. However, these approaches remain limited: they require explicit supervision on the concepts themselves, often cannot capture interactions between time-series features, lack expressiveness for complex temporal patterns, and struggle to scale to high-dimensional multivariate data. To address these limitations, we propose MAGNETS (Mask-and-AGgregate NEtwork for Time Series), an inherently interpretable neural architecture for TSER. MAGNETS learns a compact set of human-understandable concepts without requiring any annotations. Each concept corresponds to a learned, mask-based aggregation over selected input features, explicitly revealing both which features drive predictions and when they matter in the sequence. Predictions are formed as combinations of these learned concepts through a transparent, additive structure, enabling clear insight into the model's decision process. The code implementation and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/FlorentF9/MAGNETS.

One of the most pressing challenges in artificial intelligence is to make models more transparent to their users. Recently, explainable artificial intelligence has come up with numerous methods to tackle this challenge. A promising avenue is to use concept-based explanations, that is, high-level concepts instead of plain feature importance scores. Among this class of methods, Concept Activation Vectors (CAVs, Kim et al., 2018) stand out as one of the main protagonists. One interesting aspect of CAVs is that their computation requires sampling random examples from the train set. Therefore, the actual vectors obtained may vary depending on the randomness of this sampling. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained theoretical analysis of CAV construction in order to quantify their variability. Our results, confirmed by experiments on several real-life datasets of four different modalities, point to an universal result: the variance of CAVs declines roughly as $1/N$, where $N$ is the number of random examples. Based on this, we give practical recommendations for a resource-efficient application of the method.

Concept-based explanations help users understand vision models through recognizable visual patterns. However, existing methods often rely on correlational signals without directly validating which image cues support prediction-relevant internal features. To this end, we introduce VisionLogic, a post-hoc framework that grounds these features in visual concepts through intervention-based validation. VisionLogic first identifies compact sets of features whose contributions reproduce the model's original prediction. It then represents their activation states as predicates using class-specific thresholds. An iterative refinement procedure grounds these predicates in visual regions through ablation tests. A region is accepted when its removal deactivates the corresponding predicate, linking the feature's numerical role to visual evidence in the input. The same predicates allow us to examine how features are activated, selected, and reused across images and classes. Across CNNs and vision transformers on ImageNet-1k, we find that only a few features are selected to explain each prediction, and frequently active features are not always selected. In a large-scale human evaluation with 465 participants, VisionLogic significantly improves participants' understanding of model behavior over established methods ACE and CRAFT. Code is available at https://github.com/allengeng123/VisionLogic.

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has successfully addressed many complex control problems. However, the neural networks representing policies or values remain opaque, undermining trust in high-stakes applications. While concept-based methods have shown promise in deciphering internal representations in computer vision, applying them to DRL is impeded by the absence of pre-defined semantic concepts in continuous state spaces. In this work, we propose a novel concept-based explanation framework designed to provide fine-grained, neuron-level insights into DRL models. Unlike previous approaches that rely on manual feature engineering, our framework automatically aligns neuron activations with logical formulas composed of semantic predicates. To bridge the gap between continuous signals and symbolic reasoning, we introduce a value-sensitive discretization mechanism that transforms raw state features into interpretable atomic concepts. This ensures that the vocabulary used for explanation captures strategic decision boundaries relevant to the agent's value assessment. By composing these interpretable concepts and matching them with neuron behaviors, we derive explicit explanations for the network's internal representations. Experimental results on both continuous and discrete environments demonstrate that our method effectively identifies meaningful decision-making patterns, offering faithful explanations that align with human intuition.