Graph Concept Bottleneck Models

25 Sept 2024 (modified: 05 Feb 2025)Submitted to ICLR 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: Concept Bottleneck Models, Interpretability, Graphs, Graph Neural Networks, Structure Learning
Abstract: Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) provide explicit interpretations for deep neural networks through concepts and allow intervention with concepts to adjust final predictions. Existing CBMs assume concepts are conditionally independent given labels and isolated from each other, ignoring the hidden relationships among concepts. However, the set of concepts in CBMs often has an intrinsic structure where concepts are generally correlated: changing one concept will inherently impact its related concepts. To mitigate this limitation, we propose **Graph CBMs**: a new variant of CBM that facilitates concept relationships by constructing latent concept graphs, which can be combined with CBMs to enhance model performance while retaining their interpretability. Empirical results on real-world image classification tasks demonstrate Graph CBMs are (1) superior in image classification tasks while providing more concept structure information for interpretability; (2) able to utilize concept graphs for more effective interventions; and (3) robust across different training and architecture settings.
Supplementary Material: zip
Primary Area: interpretability and explainable AI
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Submission Number: 5021
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