# Attribute-formed Class-specific Concept Space: Endowing Language Bottleneck Model with Better Interpretability and Scalability

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20301 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20301/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Concept Bottleneck Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04612/) (2020)
- [Visual Classification via Description from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07183/) (2022)
- [Language in a Bottle: Language Model Guided Concept Bottlenecks for Interpretable Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11158/) (2022)
- [Post-hoc Concept Bottleneck Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15480/) (2022)
- [Label-Free Concept Bottleneck Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06129/) (2023)
- [Exploring Visual Prompts for Adapting Large-Scale Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17274/) (2022)
- [What does a platypus look like? Generating customized prompts for zero-shot image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03320/) (2022)
- [Interpreting CLIP's Image Representation via Text-Based Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05916/) (2023)
- [Learning Concise and Descriptive Attributes for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03685/) (2023)
- [VLG-CBM: Training Concept Bottleneck Models with Vision-Language Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01432/) (2024)
- [Enhancing CLIP with GPT-4: Harnessing Visual Descriptions as Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11661/) (2023)
- [Incremental Residual Concept Bottleneck Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08978/) (2024)
- [Do Vision-Language Pretrained Models Learn Composable Primitive Concepts?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17271/) (2022)
- [Democratizing Fine-grained Visual Recognition with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13837/) (2024)
- [Concept Bottleneck with Visual Concept Filtering for Explainable Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11920/) (2023)
- [If CLIP Could Talk: Understanding Vision-Language Model Representations Through Their Preferred Concept Descriptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16442/) (2024)
- [Multi-modal Attribute Prompting for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00219/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Which Concepts to Forget and How to Refuse? Decomposing Concepts for Continual Unlearning in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21484/) (2026)
- [Coverage-aware Semantic Representation Learning for Underrepresented Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16917/) (2026)
- [Measuring What Matters: Synthetic Benchmarks for Concept Bottleneck Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04326/) (2026)
- [Relational Semantic Grounding for Test-Time Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14721/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Language Bottleneck Models (LBMs) are proposed to achieve interpretable image recognition by classifying images based on textual concept bottlenecks. However, current LBMs simply list all concepts together as the bottleneck layer, leading to the spurious cue inference problem and cannot generalized to unseen classes. To address these limitations, we propose the Attribute-formed Language Bottleneck Model (ALBM). ALBM organizes concepts in the attribute-formed class-specific space, where concepts are descriptions of specific attributes for specific classes. In this way, ALBM can avoid the spurious cue inference problem by classifying solely based on the essential concepts of each class. In addition, the cross-class unified attribute set also ensures that the concept spaces of different classes have strong correlations, as a result, the learned concept classifier can be easily generalized to unseen classes. Moreover, to further improve interpretability, we propose Visual Attribute Prompt Learning (VAPL) to extract visual features on fine-grained attributes. Furthermore, to avoid labor-intensive concept annotation, we propose the Description, Summary, and Supplement (DSS) strategy to automatically generate high-quality concept sets with a complete and precise attribute. Extensive experiments on 9 widely used few-shot benchmarks demonstrate the interpretability, transferability, and performance of our approach. The code and collected concept sets are available at https://github.com/tiggers23/ALBM.