DCBM: Data-Efficient Visual Concept Bottleneck Models

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) enhance the interpretability of neural networks by basing predictions on human-understandable concepts. However, current CBMs typically rely on concept sets extracted from large language models or extensive image corpora, limiting their effectiveness in data-sparse scenarios. We propose Data-efficient CBMs (DCBMs), which reduce the need for large sample sizes during concept generation while preserving interpretability. DCBMs define concepts as image regions detected by segmentation or detection foundation models, allowing each image to generate multiple concepts across different granularities. Exclusively containing dataset-specific concepts, DCBMs are well suited for fine-grained classification and out-of-distribution tasks. Attribution analysis using Grad-CAM demonstrates that DCBMs deliver visual concepts that can be localized in test images. By leveraging dataset-specific concepts instead of predefined or general ones, DCBMs enhance adaptability to new domains. The code is available at: https: //github. com/KathPra/DCBM.

Authors

• Katharina Prasse
• Patrick Knab
• Sascha Marton
• Christian Bartelt
• Margret Keuper

Keywords

• Explainable AI
• concept bottleneck models
• foundation models