English

Concept Probing: Where to Find Human-Defined Concepts (Extended Version)

Machine Learning 2025-07-28 v1 Artificial Intelligence Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Neural and Evolutionary Computing

Abstract

Concept probing has recently gained popularity as a way for humans to peek into what is encoded within artificial neural networks. In concept probing, additional classifiers are trained to map the internal representations of a model into human-defined concepts of interest. However, the performance of these probes is highly dependent on the internal representations they probe from, making identifying the appropriate layer to probe an essential task. In this paper, we propose a method to automatically identify which layer's representations in a neural network model should be considered when probing for a given human-defined concept of interest, based on how informative and regular the representations are with respect to the concept. We validate our findings through an exhaustive empirical analysis over different neural network models and datasets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.18681,
  title  = {Concept Probing: Where to Find Human-Defined Concepts (Extended Version)},
  author = {Manuel de Sousa Ribeiro and Afonso Leote and João Leite},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.18681},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Extended version of the paper published in Proceedings of the International Conference on Neurosymbolic Learning and Reasoning (NeSy 2025)

R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:17:36.416Z