arXiv:2605.10261cs.AIcs.LG2026-05

提出E-TCAV框架,用倒数第二层高效替代深层计算,提升概念可解释性速度。

E-TCAV: Formalizing Penultimate Proxies for Efficient Concept Based Interpretability

  • 以倒数第二层为代理,避免深层计算,实现线性加速
  • 实验验证最终块与倒数第二层的TCAV分数高度一致
  • 解决传统TCAV的统计不稳和层间分歧问题,适合实时调试

TCAV(基于概念激活向量的测试)是一种评估神经网络内部表征与人类可理解的高层次概念对齐程度的可解释性方法。尽管有效,但TCAV存在显著计算开销、层间评分不一致和统计不稳定性等问题。本文通过深入研究TCAV方法的三个关键方面:1)潜在分类器对评分稳定性的影响,2)层间评分一致性,3)使用倒数第二层作为早期层的快速代理,提出了E-TCAV框架以实现高效近似。我们在四种不同架构和五个数据集上进行了广泛评估,涵盖计算机视觉与自然语言处理任务。结果表明,网络最后区块的层与倒数第二层在TCAV分数上高度一致,且常见的评分方差主要源于潜在分类器的选择。利用这种层间一致性及倒数第二层的方向敏感性退化特性,E-TCAV实现了与网络规模和评估样本数呈线性增长的速度提升,推动了高效模型调试与实时概念引导训练的发展。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

TCAV (Testing with Concept Activation Vectors) is an interpretability method that assesses the alignment between the internal representations of a trained neural network and human-understandable, high-level concepts. Though effective, TCAV suffers from significant computational overhead, inter-layer disagreement of TCAV scores, and statistical instability. This work takes a step toward addressing these challenges by introducing E-TCAV, a framework for efficient approximation of TCAV scores, which is based on extensive investigation into three key aspects of the TCAV methodology: 1) the effect of latent classifiers on the stability of TCAV scores, 2) the inter-layer agreement of TCAV scores, and 3) the use of the penultimate layer as a fast proxy for earlier layers for TCAV computation. To ensure a solid foundation for E-TCAV, we conduct extensive evaluations across four different architectures and five datasets, encompassing problems from both computer vision and natural language domains. Our results show that the layers in the final block of the neural network strongly agree with the penultimate layer in terms of the TCAV scores, and the commonly observed variance of the TCAV scores can be attributed to the choice of the latent classifier. Leveraging this inter-layer agreement and the degeneracy of directional sensitivities at the penultimate layer, E-TCAV guarantees linearly scaling speed-ups with respect to the network's size and the number of evaluation samples, marking a step towards efficient model debugging and real-time concept-guided training.

可解释性TCAV高效计算神经网络

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