@inproceedings{
srivastava2024vlgcbm,
title={{VLG}-{CBM}: Training Concept Bottleneck Models with Vision-Language Guidance},
author={Divyansh Srivastava and Ge Yan and Tsui-Wei Weng},
booktitle={The Thirty-eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
year={2024},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=Jm2aK3sDJD}
}
Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) provide interpretable prediction by introducing an intermediate Concept Bottleneck Layer (CBL), which encodes human-understandable concepts to explain models' decision. Recent works proposed to utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) and pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to automate the training of CBMs, making it more scalable and automated. However, existing approaches still fall short in two aspects: First, the concepts predicted by CBL often mismatch the input image, raising doubts about the faithfulness of interpretation. Second, it has been shown that concept values encode unintended information: even a set of random concepts could achieve comparable test accuracy to state-of-the-art CBMs. To address these critical limitations, in this work, we propose a novel framework called Vision-Language-Guided Concept Bottleneck Model (VLG-CBM) to enable faithful interpretability with the benefits of boosted performance. Our method leverages off-the-shelf open-domain grounded object detectors to provide visually grounded concept annotation, which largely enhances the faithfulness of concept prediction while further improving the model performance. In addition, we propose a new metric called Number of Effective Concepts (NEC) to control the information leakage and provide better interpretability. Extensive evaluations across five standard benchmarks show that our method, VLG-CBM, outperforms existing methods by at least 4.27\% and up to 51.09\% on accuracy at NEC=5, and by at least 0.45\% and up to 29.78\% on average accuracy across different NECs, while preserving both faithfulness and interpretability of the learned concepts as demonstrated in extensive experiments.
VLG-CBM: Training Concept Bottleneck Models with Vision-Language Guidance
Divyansh Srivastava Ge Yan Tsui-Wei Weng