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Concept Bottleneck Models (CBM) are inherently interpretable models that factor model decisions into human-readable concepts. They allow people to easily understand why a model is failing, a critical feature for high-stakes applications. CBMs require manually specified concepts and often under-perform their black box counterparts, preventing their broad adoption. We address these shortcomings and are first to show how to construct high-performance CBMs without manual specification of similar accuracy to black box models. Our approach, Language Guided Bottlenecks (LaBo), leverages a language model, GPT-3, to define a large space of possible bottlenecks. Given a problem domain, LaBo uses GPT-3 to produce factual sentences about categories to form candidate concepts. LaBo efficiently searches possible bottlenecks through a novel submodular utility that promotes the selection of discriminative and diverse information. Ultimately, GPT-3's sentential concepts can be aligned to images using CLIP, to form a bottleneck layer. Experiments demonstrate that LaBo is a highly effective prior for concepts important to visual recognition. In the evaluation with 11 diverse datasets, LaBo bottlenecks excel at few-shot classification: they are 11.7% more accurate than black box linear probes at 1 shot and comparable with more data. Overall, LaBo demonstrates that inherently interpretable models can be widely applied at similar, or better, performance than black box approaches.
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This content will become publicly available on March 5, 2026
ADAPTIVE TEST-TIME INTERVENTION FOR CONCEPT BOTTLENECK MODELS
Concept bottleneck models (CBM) aim to improve model interpretability by predicting human level “concepts” in a bottleneck within a deep learning model architecture. However, how the predicted concepts are used in predicting the target still either remains black-box or is simplified to maintain interpretability at the cost of prediction performance. We propose to use Fast Interpretable Greedy Sum- Trees (FIGS) to obtain Binary Distillation (BD). This new method, called FIGSBD, distills a binary-augmented concept-to-target portion of the CBM into an interpretable tree-based model, while maintaining the competitive prediction performance of the CBM teacher. FIGS-BD can be used in downstream tasks to explain and decompose CBM predictions into interpretable binary-concept-interaction attributions and guide adaptive test-time intervention. Across 4 datasets, we demonstrate that our adaptive test-time intervention identifies key concepts that significantly improve performance for realistic human-in-the-loop settings that only allow for limited concept interventions. All code is made available on Github (https://github.com/mattyshen/adaptiveTTI).
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- PAR ID:
- 10635695
- Publisher / Repository:
- ICLR 2025
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 979-8-3313-2085-0
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Adaptive test-time, interpretable deep learning, Conceptual bottleneck models
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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