Coarse-to-Fine Concept Bottleneck Models

Abstract: Deep learning algorithms have recently gained significant attention due to their impressive performance. However, their high complexity and un-interpretable mode of operation hinders their confident deployment in real-world safety-critical tasks. This work targets ante hoc interpretability, and specifically Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs). Our goal is to design a framework that admits a highly interpretable decision making process with respect to human understandable concepts, on two levels of granularity. To this end, we propose a novel two-level concept discovery formulation leveraging: (i) recent advances in vision-LLMs, and (ii) an innovative formulation for coarse-to-fine concept selection via data-driven and sparsity-inducing Bayesian arguments. Within this framework, concept information does not solely rely on the similarity between the whole image and general unstructured concepts; instead, we introduce the notion of concept hierarchy to uncover and exploit more granular concept information residing in patch-specific regions of the image scene. As we experimentally show, the proposed construction not only outperforms recent CBM approaches, but also yields a principled framework towards interpetability.