揭示后置概念瓶颈模型的语义失真问题,提出新评估方法
On the Faithfulness of Post-Hoc Concept Bottleneck Models

- 直接分析概念投影,发现辅助数据和视觉语言模型导致的失真
- 实证显示随机概念投影也能高准确率,但语义无意义
- 提出解耦语义忠实性与预测准确性的新指标,适合可解释性研究者
人类决策依赖于高层次概念(如通过腹部颜色识别鸟类)。为弥合深度学习表征与人类理解之间的鸿沟,后置概念瓶颈模型(post-hoc CBMs)利用辅助数据或视觉语言模型将隐层特征映射到可解释的概念空间。然而,仅以目标任务准确率为评价标准会掩盖所学概念是否具有语义意义,还是仅为预测性伪影。例如,随机概念投影也可达到竞争力的准确率,但语义上毫无意义。本文直接分析学习到的投影,识别出两种失效情形:其一,从辅助数据学习的概念投影受协变量偏移影响,导致目标任务上的概念表示不忠实,我们给出了该偏移引入误差的上界;其二,视觉语言模型生成的代理概念标签存在系统性标签噪声,导致投影不忠实。在真实世界与合成基准上的实证结果表明,这些新指标能识别出传统准确性评估无法察觉的不忠实行为。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Human decision-making interprets the world through high-level concepts, such as recognizing a bird by its belly color. To bridge the gap between opaque deep learning representations and human understanding, Post-Hoc Concept Bottleneck Models (post-hoc CBMs) project latent features onto interpretable concept spaces using auxiliary datasets or vision-language models. However, relying on target task accuracy as the primary measure of post-hoc CBM success obscures whether the learned concepts are semantically meaningful or merely predictive artifacts. For example, random concept projections can achieve competitive accuracy despite being semantically meaningless. In this work, we analyze the learned projections directly and identify two failure cases: First, for concept projections learned from auxiliary data, covariate shifts can lead to unfaithful concept representations for the target task. In particular, we provide an upper bound on the error introduced by this shift. Second, systematic label noise in surrogate concept labels generated by vision-language models leads to unfaithful projections. After formalizing these failure modes, we introduce novel metrics that decouple concept faithfulness from predictive accuracy. Our empirical results across real-world and synthetic benchmarks confirm that these metrics identify unfaithful behaviors that standard accuracy-based evaluation fails to detect.
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