Concept Bottleneck Large Language Models

We introduce the Concept Bottleneck Large Language Model (CB-LLM), a pioneering approach to creating inherently interpretable Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike traditional black-box LLMs that rely on post-hoc interpretation methods with limited neuron function insights, CB-LLM sets a new standard with its built-in interpretability, scalability, and ability to provide clear, accurate explanations. We investigate two essential tasks in the NLP domain: text classification and text generation. In text classification, CB-LLM narrows the performance gap with traditional black-box models and provides clear interpretability. In text generation, we show how interpretable neurons in CB-LLM can be used for concept detection and steering text generation. Our CB-LLMs enable greater interaction between humans and LLMs across a variety of tasks -- a feature notably absent in existing LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/Trustworthy-ML-Lab/CB-LLMs.

Concept Bottleneck Language Models For protein design

We introduce Concept Bottleneck Protein Language Models (CB-pLM), a generative masked language model with a layer where each neuron corresponds to an interpretable concept. Our architecture offers three key benefits: i) Control: We can intervene on concept values to precisely control the properties of generated proteins, achieving a 3 times larger change in desired concept values compared to baselines. ii) Interpretability: A linear mapping between concept values and predicted tokens allows transparent analysis of the model's decision-making process. iii) Debugging: This transparency facilitates easy debugging of trained models. Our models achieve pre-training perplexity and downstream task performance comparable to traditional masked protein language models, demonstrating that interpretability does not compromise performance. While adaptable to any language model, we focus on masked protein language models due to their importance in drug discovery and the ability to validate our model's capabilities through real-world experiments and expert knowledge. We scale our CB-pLM from 24 million to 3 billion parameters, making them the largest Concept Bottleneck Models trained and the first capable of generative language modeling.

Crafting Large Language Models for Enhanced Interpretability

We introduce the Concept Bottleneck Large Language Model (CB-LLM), a pioneering approach to creating inherently interpretable Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike traditional black-box LLMs that rely on post-hoc interpretation methods with limited neuron function insights, CB-LLM sets a new standard with its built-in interpretability, scalability, and ability to provide clear, accurate explanations. This innovation not only advances transparency in language models but also enhances their effectiveness. Our unique Automatic Concept Correction (ACC) strategy successfully narrows the performance gap with conventional black-box LLMs, positioning CB-LLM as a model that combines the high accuracy of traditional LLMs with the added benefit of clear interpretability -- a feature markedly absent in existing LLMs.

Linear Explanations for Individual Neurons

In recent years many methods have been developed to understand the internal workings of neural networks, often by describing the function of individual neurons in the model. However, these methods typically only focus on explaining the very highest activations of a neuron. In this paper we show this is not sufficient, and that the highest activation range is only responsible for a very small percentage of the neuron's causal effect. In addition, inputs causing lower activations are often very different and can't be reliably predicted by only looking at high activations. We propose that neurons should instead be understood as a linear combination of concepts, and develop an efficient method for producing these linear explanations. In addition, we show how to automatically evaluate description quality using simulation, i.e. predicting neuron activations on unseen inputs in vision setting.

Describe-and-Dissect: Interpreting Neurons in Vision Networks with Language Models

In this paper, we propose Describe-and-Dissect (DnD), a novel method to describe the roles of hidden neurons in vision networks. DnD utilizes recent advancements in multimodal deep learning to produce complex natural language descriptions, without the need for labeled training data or a predefined set of concepts to choose from. Additionally, DnD is training-free, meaning we don't train any new models and can easily leverage more capable general purpose models in the future. We have conducted extensive qualitative and quantitative analysis to show that DnD outperforms prior work by providing higher quality neuron descriptions. Specifically, our method on average provides the highest quality labels and is more than 2 times as likely to be selected as the best explanation for a neuron than the best baseline.

Corrupting Neuron Explanations of Deep Visual Features

The inability of DNNs to explain their black-box behavior has led to a recent surge of explainability methods. However, there are growing concerns that these explainability methods are not robust and trustworthy. In this work, we perform the first robustness analysis of Neuron Explanation Methods under a unified pipeline and show that these explanations can be significantly corrupted by random noises and well-designed perturbations added to their probing data. We find that even adding small random noise with a standard deviation of 0.02 can already change the assigned concepts of up to 28% neurons in the deeper layers. Furthermore, we devise a novel corruption algorithm and show that our algorithm can manipulate the explanation of more than 80% neurons by poisoning less than 10% of probing data. This raises the concern of trusting Neuron Explanation Methods in real-life safety and fairness critical applications.

The Importance of Prompt Tuning for Automated Neuron Explanations

Recent advances have greatly increased the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but our understanding of the models and their safety has not progressed as fast. In this paper we aim to understand LLMs deeper by studying their individual neurons. We build upon previous work showing large language models such as GPT-4 can be useful in explaining what each neuron in a language model does. Specifically, we analyze the effect of the prompt used to generate explanations and show that reformatting the explanation prompt in a more natural way can significantly improve neuron explanation quality and greatly reduce computational cost. We demonstrate the effects of our new prompts in three different ways, incorporating both automated and human evaluations.

Concept-Monitor: Understanding DNN training through individual neurons

In this work, we propose a general framework called Concept-Monitor to help demystify the black-box DNN training processes automatically using a novel unified embedding space and concept diversity metric. Concept-Monitor enables human-interpretable visualization and indicators of the DNN training processes and facilitates transparency as well as deeper understanding on how DNNs develop along the during training. Inspired by these findings, we also propose a new training regularizer that incentivizes hidden neurons to learn diverse concepts, which we show to improve training performance. Finally, we apply Concept-Monitor to conduct several case studies on different training paradigms including adversarial training, fine-tuning and network pruning via the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis

Label-Free Concept Bottleneck Models

Concept bottleneck models (CBM) are a popular way of creating more interpretable neural networks by having hidden layer neurons correspond to human-understandable concepts. However, existing CBMs and their variants have two crucial limitations: first, they need to collect labeled data for each of the predefined concepts, which is time consuming and labor intensive; second, the accuracy of a CBM is often significantly lower than that of a standard neural network, especially on more complex datasets. This poor performance creates a barrier for adopting CBMs in practical real world applications. Motivated by these challenges, we propose Label-free CBM which is a novel framework to transform any neural network into an interpretable CBM without labeled concept data, while retaining a high accuracy. Our Label-free CBM has many advantages, it is: scalable - we present the first CBM scaled to ImageNet, efficient - creating a CBM takes only a few hours even for very large datasets, and automated - training it for a new dataset requires minimal human effort. Our code is available at https://github.com/Trustworthy-ML-Lab/Label-free-CBM.

CLIP-Dissect: Automatic Description of Neuron Representations in Deep Vision Networks

In this paper, we propose CLIP-Dissect, a new technique to automatically describe the function of individual hidden neurons inside vision networks. CLIP-Dissect leverages recent advances in multimodal vision/language models to label internal neurons with open-ended concepts without the need for any labeled data or human examples, which are required for existing tools to succeed. We show that CLIP-Dissect provides more accurate descriptions than existing methods for neurons where the ground-truth is available as well as qualitatively good descriptions for hidden layer neurons. In addition, our method is very flexible: it is model agnostic, can easily handle new concepts and can be extended to take advantage of better multimodal models in the future. Finally CLIP-Dissect is computationally efficient and labels all neurons of a layer in a large vision model in tens of minutes.