Concept Bottleneck Models Without Predefined Concepts

Abstract

There has been considerable recent interest in interpretable concept-based models such as Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), which first predict human-interpretable concepts and then map them to output classes. To reduce reliance on human-annotated concepts, recent works have converted pretrained black-box models into interpretable CBMs post-hoc. However, these approaches predefine a set of concepts, assuming which concepts a black-box model encodes in its representations. In this work, we eliminate this assumption by leveraging unsupervised concept discovery to automatically extract concepts without human annotations or a predefined set of concepts. We further introduce an input-dependent concept selection mechanism that ensures only a small subset of concepts is used across all classes. We show that our approach improves downstream performance and narrows the performance gap to black-box models, while using significantly fewer concepts in the classification. Finally, we demonstrate how large vision-language models can intervene on the final model weights to correct model errors.