To remedy this, most robust fine-tuning methods aim to preserve the pre-trained features.

Concept activation vector (CAV) has attracted broad research interest in explainable AI, by elegantly attributing model predictions to specific concepts. However, the training of CAV often necessitates a large number of high-quality images, which are expensive to curate and thus limited to a predefined set of concepts. To address this issue, we propose Language-Guided CAV (LG-CAV) to harness the abundant concept knowledge within the certain pre-trained vision-language models (e.g., CLIP). This method allows training any CAV without labeled data, by utilizing the corresponding concept descriptions as guidance. To bridge the gap between vision-language model and the target model, we calculate the activation values of concept descriptions on a common pool of images (probe images) with vision-language model and utilize them as language guidance to train the LG-CAV. Furthermore, after training high-quality LG-CAVs related to all the predicted classes in the target model, we propose the activation sample reweighting (ASR), serving as a model correction technique, to improve the performance of the target model in return. Experiments on four datasets across nine architectures demonstrate that LG-CAV achieves significantly superior quality to previous CAV methods given any concept, and our model correction method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing concept-based methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/hqhQAQ/LG-CAV.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong semantic understanding, yet struggle when user instructions involve ambiguous or conceptually misaligned terms. We propose the Language Graph Model (LGM) to enhance conceptual clarity by extracting meta-relations-inheritance, alias, and composition-from natural language. The model further employs a reflection mechanism to validate these meta-relations. Leveraging a Concept Iterative Retrieval Algorithm, these relations and related descriptions are dynamically supplied to the LLM, improving its ability to interpret concepts and generate accurate responses. Unlike conventional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approaches that rely on extended context windows, our method enables large language models to process texts of any length without the need for truncation. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that the LGM consistently outperforms existing RAG baselines.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) underpin many modern computer vision systems. With applications ranging from common to critical areas, a need to explain and understand the model and its decisions (XAI) emerged. Prior works suggest that in the top layers of CNNs, the individual channels can be attributed to classifying human-understandable concepts. Concept relevance propagation (CRP) methods can backtrack predictions to these channels and find images that most activate these channels. However, current CRP workflows are largely manual: experts must inspect activation images to name the discovered concepts and must synthesize verbose explanations from relevance maps, limiting the accessibility of the explanations and their scalability. To address these issues, we introduce Large Language model EXplaIns COncept Relevance Propagation (LLEXICORP), a modular pipeline that couples CRP with a multimodal large language model. Our approach automatically assigns descriptive names to concept prototypes and generates natural-language explanations that translate quantitative relevance distributions into intuitive narratives. To ensure faithfulness, we craft prompts that teach the language model the semantics of CRP through examples and enforce a separation between naming and explanation tasks. The resulting text can be tailored to different audiences, offering low-level technical descriptions for experts and high-level summaries for non-technical stakeholders. We qualitatively evaluate our method on various images from ImageNet on a VGG16 model. Our findings suggest that integrating concept-based attribution methods with large language models can significantly lower the barrier to interpreting deep neural networks, paving the way for more transparent AI systems.

Understanding the decision-making processes of neural networks is a central goal of mechanistic interpretability. In the context of Large Language Models (LLMs), this involves uncovering the underlying mechanisms and identifying the roles of individual model components such as neurons and attention heads, as well as model abstractions such as the learned sparse features extracted by Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs). A rapidly growing line of work tackles this challenge by using powerful generator models to produce open-vocabulary, natural language concept descriptions for these components. In this paper, we provide the first survey of the emerging field of concept descriptions for model components and abstractions. We chart the key methods for generating these descriptions, the evolving landscape of automated and human metrics for evaluating them, and the datasets that underpin this research. Our synthesis reveals a growing demand for more rigorous, causal evaluation. By outlining the state of the art and identifying key challenges, this survey provides a roadmap for future research toward making models more transparent.

Concept activation vector (CAV) has attracted broad research interest in explainable AI, by elegantly attributing model predictions to specific concepts. However, the training of CAV often necessitates a large number of high-quality images, which are expensive to curate and thus limited to a predefined set of concepts. To address this issue, we propose Language-Guided CAV (LG-CAV) to harness the abundant concept knowledge within the certain pre-trained vision-language models (e.g., CLIP). This method allows training any CAV without labeled data, by utilizing the corresponding concept descriptions as guidance. To bridge the gap between vision-language model and the target model, we calculate the activation values of concept descriptions on a common pool of images (probe images) with vision-language model and utilize them as language guidance to train the LG-CAV.

Video personalization, which generates customized videos using reference images, has gained significant attention. However, prior methods typically focus on single-concept personalization, limiting broader applications that require multi-concept integration. Attempts to extend these models to multiple concepts often lead to identity blending, which results in composite characters with fused attributes from multiple sources. This challenge arises due to the lack of a mechanism to link each concept with its specific reference image. We address this with anchored prompts, which embed image anchors as unique tokens within text prompts, guiding accurate referencing during generation. Additionally, we introduce concept embeddings to encode the order of reference images. Our approach, Movie Weaver, seamlessly weaves multiple concepts-including face, body, and animal images-into one video, allowing flexible combinations in a single model. The evaluation shows that Movie Weaver outperforms existing methods for multi-concept video personalization in identity preservation and overall quality.