Decomposition of Concept-Level Rules in Visual Scenes

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission19743 Authors

Keywords: Compositionality, Concept-Level Rules Decomposition, Large Vision-Language Models

Abstract: Human cognition is compositional, and one can parse a visual scene into independent concepts and the corresponding concept-changing rules. By contrast, many vision-language systems process images holistically, with limited support for explicit decomposition. And previous methods of decomposing concepts and rules often rely on hand-crafted inductive biases or human-designed priors. We introduce a framework (CRD) to decompose concept-level rules with Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), which explains visual input by extracting LVLM-extracted concepts and the rules governing their variation. The proposed method operates in two stages: (1) a pretrained LVLM proposes visual concepts and concept values, which are employed to instantiate a space of concept rule functions that model concept changes and spatial distributions; (2) an iterative process to select a concise set of concepts that best account for the input according to the rule function. We evaluate CRD on an abstract visual reasoning benchmark and a real-world image caption dataset. Across both settings, our approach outperforms baseline models while improving interpretability by explicitly revealing underlying concepts and compositional rules, advancing explainable and generalizable visual reasoning.

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

Submission Number: 19743