CRAFT: Concept Recursive Activation FacTorization for Explainability
Thomas Fel, Agustin Martin Picard, Louis Béthune, Thibaut Boissin, David Vigouroux, Julien Colin, Rémi Cadène, Thomas Serre
Abstract
Figure 1 . The "Man on the Moon" incorrectly classified as a "shovel" by an ImageNet-trained ResNet50. Heatmap generated by a classic attribution method [55] (left) vs. concept attribution maps generated with the proposed CRAFT approach (right) which highlights the two most influential concepts that drove the ResNet50's decision along with their corresponding locations. CRAFT suggests that the neural net arrived at its decision because it identified the concept of "dirt" • commonly found in members of the image class "shovel" and the concept of "ski pants" • typically worn by people clearing snow from their driveway with a shovel instead the correct concept of astronaut's pants (which was probably never seen during training).
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Cited by top-tier papers69
- A Holistic Approach to Unifying Automatic Concept Extraction and Concept Importance EstimationThomas Fel, Victor Boutin, Louis Béthune, Rémi Cadène et al.NeurIPS 2023 · 125 citations
- Projecting Assumptions: The Duality Between Sparse Autoencoders and Concept GeometrySai Sumedh R. Hindupur, Ekdeep Singh Lubana, Thomas Fel, Demba BaNeurIPS 2025 · 65 citations
- Text-To-Concept (and Back) via Cross-Model AlignmentMazda Moayeri, Keivan Rezaei, Maziar Sanjabi, Soheil FeiziICML 2023 · 62 citations
- From Flat to Hierarchical: Extracting Sparse Representations with Matching PursuitValérie Costa, Thomas Fel, Ekdeep Singh Lubana, Bahareh Tolooshams et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 54 citations
- A Concept-Based Explainability Framework for Large Multimodal ModelsJayneel Parekh, Pegah Khayatan, Mustafa Shukor, Alasdair Newson et al.NeurIPS 2024 · 48 citations
Builds on14
- Efficient and Modular Implicit DifferentiationMathieu Blondel, Quentin Berthet, Marco Cuturi, Roy Frostig et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 386 citations
- Evaluating Explainable AI: Which Algorithmic Explanations Help Users Predict Model Behavior?Peter Hase, Mohit BansalACL 2020 · 216 citations
- When Explanations Lie: Why Many Modified BP Attributions FailLeon Sixt, Maximilian Granz, Tim LandgrafICML 2020 · 147 citations
- What I Cannot Predict, I Do Not Understand: A Human-Centered Evaluation Framework for Explainability MethodsJulien Colin, Thomas Fel, Rémi Cadène, Thomas SerreNeurIPS 2022 · 147 citations
- Invertible Concept-based Explanations for CNN Models with Non-negative Concept Activation VectorsRuihan Zhang, Prashan Madumal, Tim Miller, Krista A. Ehinger et al.AAAI 2021 · 140 citations
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