English

On the Performance of Concept Probing: The Influence of the Data (Extended Version)

Artificial Intelligence 2025-07-25 v1 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Machine Learning Neural and Evolutionary Computing

Abstract

Concept probing has recently garnered increasing interest as a way to help interpret artificial neural networks, dealing both with their typically large size and their subsymbolic nature, which ultimately renders them unfeasible for direct human interpretation. Concept probing works by training additional classifiers to map the internal representations of a model into human-defined concepts of interest, thus allowing humans to peek inside artificial neural networks. Research on concept probing has mainly focused on the model being probed or the probing model itself, paying limited attention to the data required to train such probing models. In this paper, we address this gap. Focusing on concept probing in the context of image classification tasks, we investigate the effect of the data used to train probing models on their performance. We also make available concept labels for two widely used datasets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.18550,
  title  = {On the Performance of Concept Probing: The Influence of the Data (Extended Version)},
  author = {Manuel de Sousa Ribeiro and Afonso Leote and João Leite},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.18550},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Extended version of the paper published in Proceedings of the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2025)