Representational Similarity via Interpretable Visual Concepts
Neehar Kondapaneni, Oisin Mac Aodha, Pietro Perona
Abstract
How do two deep neural networks differ in how they arrive at a decision? Measuring the similarity of deep networks has been a long-standing open question. Most existing methods provide a single number to measure the similarity of two networks at a given layer, but give no insight into what makes them similar or dissimilar. We introduce an interpretable representational similarity method (RSVC) to compare two networks. We use RSVC to discover shared and unique visual concepts between two models. We show that some aspects of model differences can be attributed to unique concepts discovered by one model that are not well represented in the other. Finally, we conduct extensive evaluation across different vision model architectures and training protocols to demonstrate its effectiveness.
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Cited by top-tier papers3
- Beyond Scalars: Concept-Based Alignment Analysis in Vision TransformersJohanna Vielhaben, Dilyara Bareeva, Jim Berend, Wojciech Samek et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 11 citations
- Measuring the (Un)Faithfulness of Concept-Based ExplanationsShubham Kumar, Narendra AhujaCVPR 2026 · 1 citation
- Representational Difference ExplanationsNeehar Kondapaneni, Oisin Mac Aodha, Pietro PeronaNeurIPS 2025
Builds on23
- An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at ScaleAlexey Dosovitskiy, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, Dirk Weissenborn et al.ICLR 2021 · 21,477 citations
- Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision TransformersMathilde Caron, Hugo Touvron, Ishan Misra, Hervé Jégou et al.ICCV 2021 · 8,921 citations
- Do Vision Transformers See Like Convolutional Neural Networks?Maithra Raghu, Thomas Unterthiner, Simon Kornblith, Chiyuan Zhang et al.NeurIPS 2021 · 1,553 citations
- Sparse Autoencoders Find Highly Interpretable Features in Language ModelsRobert Huben, Hoagy Cunningham, Logan Riggs Smith, Aidan Ewart et al.ICLR 2024 · 1,072 citations
- What is being transferred in transfer learning?Behnam Neyshabur, Hanie Sedghi, Chiyuan ZhangNeurIPS 2020 · 654 citations
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