The paper introduces ICON Decomposition, a method for auditing deep neural networks by decomposing layer-wise representations into independent concept contributions. Unlike existing techniques that rely on linear probes or concept activation vectors, ICON quantifies the variance share each concept explains while conditioning on all other concepts and the outcome, allowing comparison across layers and concept types. Experiments on simulated data, skin‑cancer, and neuroimaging models show that ICON more accurately recovers true concept importance and can distinguish learned shortcuts from correlated concepts, as validated by retraining and out‑of‑distribution tests.
By Roshan Prakash Rane, Marco Simnacher, Manuel Pfeuffer, Marc-Andre Schulz, Nys Tjade Siegel, Maximilian Dreyer, Frederik Pahde, Wojciech Samek, Sonja Greven, Kerstin Ritter
arXiv:2608.26083v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Deep neural networks often exploit spurious associations, a failure known as shortcut learning. Auditing for shortcuts requires testing many...
By Roshan Prakash Rane, Marco Simnacher, Manuel Pfeuffer, Marc-Andre Schulz, Nys Tjade Siegel, Maximilian Dreyer, Frederik Pahde, Wojciech Samek, Sonja Greven, Kerstin Ritter
ICON Decomposition is a new method for explaining deep neural networks by quantifying how much variance each concept explains in a network layer after accounting for all other concepts and the outcome. Unlike previous concept‑based methods that evaluate concepts in isolation, ICON can distinguish genuine model reliance from spurious correlations. Experiments on synthetic data, skin‑lesion, and brain‑imaging models show that ICON recovers concept importance more accurately, isolates truly relied‑upon concepts, and provides sparse explanations validated through retraining and out‑of‑distribution testing.
By Roshan Prakash Rane, Marco Simnacher, Manuel Pfeuffer, Marc-Andre Schulz, Nys Tjade Siegel, Maximilian Dreyer, Frederik Pahde, Wojciech Samek, Sonja Greven, Kerstin Ritter
arXiv:2510. 15770v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Although deep neural networks achieve strong predictive performance, their internal reasoning often remains difficult to inspect and control.
By Gaoxiang Huang, Songning Lai, Yutao Yue
arXiv:2607. 09649v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Concept-based explainable artificial intelligence (AI) can make model reasoning more human-understandable, but concept-level outputs are not automatically trustworthy.
By Mohadeseh Mollapour, Koorosh Aslansefat, Zeinab Dehghani, Bhupesh Kumar Mishra, Tejal Shah, Zhibao Mian
arXiv:2606. 01843v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deepfake detection suffers from poor generalization across forgery methods, as existing models tend to rely on spurious method-specific shortcuts that fail to transfer to unseen manipulations.
By Yihui Wang, Yonghui Yang, Jilong Liu, Fengbin Zhu, Le Wu, Tat-Seng Chua