Aligning Visual and Semantic Interpretability through Visually Grounded Concept Bottleneck Models

The performance of neural networks increases steadily, but our understanding of their decision-making lags behind. Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) address this issue by incorporating human-understandable concepts into the prediction process, thereby enhancing transparency and interpretability. Since existing approaches often rely on large language models (LLMs) to infer concepts, their results may contain inaccurate or incomplete mappings, especially in complex visual domains. We introduce visually Grounded Concept Bottleneck Models (GCBM), which derive concepts on the image level using segmentation and detection foundation models. Our method generates inherently interpretable concepts, which can be grounded in the input image using attribution methods, allowing interpretations to be traced back to the image plane. We show that GCBM concepts are meaningful interpretability vehicles, which aid our understanding of model embedding spaces. GCBMs allow users to control the granularity, number, and naming of concepts, providing flexibility and are easily adaptable to new datasets without pre-training or additional data needed. Prediction accuracy is within 0.3-6% of the linear probe and GCBMs perform especially well for fine-grained classification interpretability on CUB, due to their dataset specificity. Our code is available on https://github.com/KathPra/GCBM.

Interpreting Outliers in Time Series Data through Decoding Autoencoder

Outlier detection is a crucial analytical tool in various fields. In critical systems like manufacturing, malfunctioning outlier detection can be costly and safety-critical. Therefore, there is a significant need for explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) when deploying opaque models in such environments. This study focuses on manufacturing time series data from a German automotive supply industry. We utilize autoencoders to compress the entire time series and then apply anomaly detection techniques to its latent features. For outlier interpretation, we (i) adopt widely used XAI techniques to the autoencoder's encoder. Additionally, (ii) we propose AEE, Aggregated Explanatory Ensemble, a novel approach that fuses explanations of multiple XAI techniques into a single, more expressive interpretation. For evaluation of explanations, (iii) we propose a technique to measure the quality of encoder explanations quantitatively. Furthermore, we qualitatively assess the effectiveness of outlier explanations with domain expertise.

DSEG-LIME - Improving Image Explanation by Hierarchical Data-Driven Segmentation

Explainable Artificial Intelligence is critical in unraveling decision-making processes in complex machine learning models. LIME (Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations) is a well-known XAI framework for image analysis. It utilizes image segmentation to create features to identify relevant areas for classification. Consequently, poor segmentation can compromise the consistency of the explanation and undermine the importance of the segments, affecting the overall interpretability. Addressing these challenges, we introduce DSEG-LIME (Data-Driven Segmentation LIME), featuring: i) a data-driven segmentation for human-recognized feature generation, and ii) a hierarchical segmentation procedure through composition. We benchmark DSEG-LIME on pre-trained models with images from the ImageNet dataset - scenarios without domain-specific knowledge. The analysis includes a quantitative evaluation using established XAI metrics, complemented by a qualitative assessment through a user study. Our findings demonstrate that DSEG outperforms in most of the XAI metrics and enhances the alignment of explanations with human-recognized concepts, significantly improving interpretability. The code is available under: https://github. com/patrick-knab/DSEG-LIME