Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) introduce interpretability to black-box deep learning models by predicting labels through human-understandable concepts. However, unlike humans, who identify objects at different levels of abstraction using both general and specific features, existing CBMs operate at a single semantic level in both concept and label space. We propose HIL-CBM, a Hierarchical Interpretable Label-Free Concept Bottleneck Model that extends CBMs into a hierarchical framework to enhance interpretability by more closely mirroring the human cognitive process. HIL-CBM enables classification and explanation across multiple semantic levels without requiring relational concept annotations. HIL-CBM aligns the abstraction level of concept-based explanations with that of model predictions, progressing from abstract to concrete. This is achieved by (i) introducing a gradient-based visual consistency loss that encourages abstraction layers to focus on similar spatial regions, and (ii) training dual classification heads, each operating on feature concepts at different abstraction levels. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that HIL-CBM outperforms state-of-the-art sparse CBMs in classification accuracy. Human evaluations further show that HIL-CBM provides more interpretable and accurate explanations, while maintaining a hierarchical and label-free approach to feature concepts.
Information Bottleneck-Guided Heterogeneous Graph Learning for Interpretable Neurodevelopmental Disorder Diagnosis
Department of Language Science and Technology, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学语言科学与技术系）；Laboratory of Digital Image and Intelligent Computation, Shanghai Maritime University（上海 Maritime 大学数字图像与智能计算实验室）
Deep neural networks are a key component of behavior prediction and motion generation for self-driving cars. One of their main drawbacks is a lack of transparency: they should provide easy to interpret rationales for what triggers certain behaviors. We propose an architecture called Attentional Bottleneck with the goal of improving transparency. Our key idea is to combine visual attention, which identifies what aspects of the input the model is using, with an information bottleneck that enables the model to only use aspects of the input which are important. This not only provides sparse and in…
Concept Complement Bottleneck Model for Interpretable Medical Image Diagnosis
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程系）；Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering（化学与生物工程系）；Division of Life Science（生命科学部）
Wageningen University（瓦赫宁根大学）；Oxford University（牛津大学）；CMAP, École Polytechnique（巴黎综合理工学院应用数学中心）；IRISA, University Bretagne Sud, CNRS（南布列塔尼大学、法国国家科学研究中心、IRISA）；EPFL（洛桑联邦理工学院）
Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are known to learn an image representation that captures concepts relevant to the task, but do so in an implicit way that hampers model interpretability. However, one could argue that such a representation is hidden in the neurons and can be made explicit by teaching the model to recognize semantically interpretable attributes that are present in the scene. We call such an intermediate layer a \emph{semantic bottleneck}. Once the attributes are learned, they can be re-combined to reach the final decision and provide both an accurate prediction and an explici…
University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）
While deep learning methods are increasingly being applied to tasks such as computer-aided diagnosis, these models are difficult to interpret, do not incorporate prior domain knowledge, and are often considered as a "black-box." The lack of model interpretability hinders them from being fully understood by target users such as radiologists. In this paper, we present a novel interpretable deep hierarchical semantic convolutional neural network (HSCNN) to predict whether a given pulmonary nodule observed on a computed tomography (CT) scan is malignant. Our network provides two levels of output: …
Language Guided Concept Bottleneck Models for Interpretable Continual Learning
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Tianjin University of Technology（天津理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Information Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学信息科学技术学院）；Institute of Automation, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）
CI-CBM: Class-Incremental Concept Bottleneck Model for Interpretable Continual Learning
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校电气与计算机工程系）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校计算机科学与工程系）；Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校Halıcıoğlu数据科学研究所）
Interpretable Single-View 3D Gaussian Splatting using Unsupervised Hierarchical Disentangled Representation Learning
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Ningbo Institute of Digital Twin, Eastern Institute of Technology（东方理工大学宁波数字孪生研究院）；Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
With the increasing demands for accountability, interpretability is becoming an essential capability for real-world AI applications. However, most methods utilize post-hoc approaches rather than training the interpretable model. In this article, we propose a novel interpretable model based on the concept bottleneck model (CBM). CBM uses concept labels to train an intermediate layer as the additional visible layer. However, because the number of concept labels restricts the dimension of this layer, it is difficult to obtain high accuracy with a small number of labels. To address this issue, we …
Hierarchical Vision Transformer with Prototypes for Interpretable Medical Image Classification
Ulm University Medical Center（乌尔姆大学医学中心）；BGZ - Bildgebungszentrum（BGZ影像中心）；i2SouI - Innovative Imaging in Surgical Oncology Ulm（乌尔姆外科肿瘤创新影像中心）；XAIRAD - Cooperation for Artificial Intelligence in Experimental Radiology（XAIRAD实验放射学人工智能合作中心）
Hierarchical structures are popular in recent vision transformers, however, they require sophisticated designs and massive datasets to work well. In this paper, we explore the idea of nesting basic local transformers on non-overlapping image blocks and aggregating them in a hierarchical way. We find that the block aggregation function plays a critical role in enabling cross-block non-local information communication. This observation leads us to design a simplified architecture that requires minor code changes upon the original vision transformer. The benefits of the proposed judiciously-select…
Hierarchical Salient Patch Identification for Interpretable Fundus Disease Localization
School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Tongji University（同济大学电子与信息工程学院）；Shanghai Eye Disease Prevention and Treatment Center（上海眼病防治中心）；School of Information Science and Technology, Fudan University（复旦大学信息科学与技术学院）
Interpretable Aneurysm Classification via 3D Concept Bottleneck Models: Integrating Morphological and Hemodynamic Clinical Features
Biomedical Sciences Program, School of Sciences, Zewail City of Science and Technology（泽瓦伊科学与技术城科学与技术学院生物医学科学项目）；Multimedia Interaction and Communication Lab, Arab Academy for Science and Technology（阿拉伯科学与技术学院多媒体交互与通信实验室）
Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior（马克斯·普朗克动物行为研究所）；University of Konstanz（康斯坦茨大学）；Centro de Investigaciones Científicas de las Huastecas Aguazarca, A.C.（华斯特卡斯阿瓜扎尔卡科学研究中心）；University of Würzburg（维尔茨堡大学）；Texas A&M University（得克萨斯农工大学）；Texas State University San Marcos（得克萨斯州立大学圣马科斯分校）
Apart from discriminative models for classification and object detection tasks, the application of deep convolutional neural networks to basic research utilizing natural imaging data has been somewhat limited; particularly in cases where a set of interpretable features for downstream analysis is needed, a key requirement for many scientific investigations. We present an algorithm and training paradigm designed specifically to address this: decontextualized hierarchical representation learning (DHRL). By combining a generative model chaining procedure with a ladder network architecture and late…
University of California, Santa Barbara（加利福尼亚大学圣巴巴拉分校）
Fundus photography has routinely been used to document the presence and severity of retinal degenerative diseases such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD), glaucoma, and diabetic retinopathy (DR) in clinical practice, for which the fovea and optic disc (OD) are important retinal landmarks. However, the occurrence of lesions, drusen, and other retinal abnormalities during retinal degeneration severely complicates automatic landmark detection and segmentation. Here we propose HBA-U-Net: a U-Net backbone enriched with hierarchical bottleneck attention. The network consists of a novel bottle…
DashFusion: Dual-stream Alignment with Hierarchical Bottleneck Fusion for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis
School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学人工智能学院）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University（清华大学信息科学与技术国家研究中心）；Department of Automation, Tsinghua University（清华大学自动化系）
Hierarchical Invariance for Robust and Interpretable Vision Tasks at Larger Scales
College of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学计算机科学与技术学院）；College of Cyber Security, Jinan University（暨南大学网络安全学院）；School of Cyber Science and Technology, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学深圳校区网络空间安全学院）
Vision models are interpretable when they classify objects on the basis of features that a person can directly understand. Recently, methods relying on visual feature prototypes have been developed for this purpose. However, in contrast to how humans categorize objects, these approaches have not yet made use of any taxonomical organization of class labels. With such an approach, for instance, we may see why a chimpanzee is classified as a chimpanzee, but not why it was considered to be a primate or even an animal. In this work we introduce a model that uses hierarchically organized prototypes …
Show and Tell: Visually Explainable Deep Neural Nets via Spatially-Aware Concept Bottleneck Models
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev（电气与计算机工程系，贝内-约尔大学内盖夫分校）；Data Science Research Center, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev（数据科学研究中心，贝内-约尔大学内盖夫分校）
SurfAge-Net: A Hierarchical Surface-Based Network for Interpretable Fine-Grained Brain Age Prediction
Gansu Provincial Key Laboratory of Wearable Computing, School of Information Science and Engineering, Lanzhou University（甘肃省可穿戴计算重点实验室，信息科学与工程学院，兰州大学）；Department of Medical Imaging Center, Gansu Provincial Maternity and Child-Care Hospital（医学影像中心，甘肃省妇幼保健院）；Department of Magnetic Resonance, Lanzhou University Second Hospital（磁共振科，兰州大学第二医院）；Department of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（计算机科学与技术系，哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Key Laboratory for Biomedical Engineering of Ministry of Education, Department of Biomedical Engineering, College of Biomedical Engineering & Instrument Science, Zhejiang University（教育部生物医学工程重点实验室，生物医学工程学院，浙江大学）
