Navigating Neural Space: Revisiting Concept Activation Vectors to Overcome Directional Divergence
Frederik Pahde Maximilian Dreyer Moritz Weckbecker Leander Weber Christopher J. Anders Thomas Wiegand Wojciech Samek Sebastian Lapuschkin
With a growing interest in understanding neural network prediction strategies, Concept Activation Vectors (CAVs) have emerged as a popular tool for modeling human-understandable concepts in the latent space.
Commonly, CAVs are computed by leveraging linear classifiers optimizing the *separability* of latent representations of samples with and without a given concept. However, in this paper we show that such a separability-oriented computation leads to solutions, which may diverge from the actual goal of precisely modeling the concept direction.
This discrepancy can be attributed to the significant influence of distractor directions, i.e., signals unrelated to the concept, which are picked up by filters (i.e., weights) of linear models to optimize class-separability.
To address this, we introduce *pattern-based CAVs*, solely focussing on concept signals, thereby providing more accurate concept directions.
We evaluate various CAV methods in terms of their alignment with the true concept direction and their impact on CAV applications, including concept sensitivity testing and model correction for shortcut behavior caused by data artifacts. 
We demonstrate the benefits of pattern-based CAVs using the Pediatric Bone Age, ISIC2019, and FunnyBirds datasets with VGG, ResNet, ReXNet, EfficientNet, and Vision Transformer as model architectures.
Explainable AI, Concept-based Explanations, Concept Activation Vectors
We introduce pattern-based CAVs, an alternative to widely used filter (e.g., SVM) CAVs, more robust to distractor patterns and thereby providing more accurate concept directions.