# MVP-CBM:Multi-layer Visual Preference-enhanced Concept Bottleneck Model for Explainable Medical Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12568 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12568/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [Concept Bottleneck Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04612/) (2020)
- [MedCLIP: Contrastive Learning from Unpaired Medical Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10163/) (2022)
- [BiomedCLIP: a multimodal biomedical foundation model pretrained from fifteen million scientific image-text pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00915/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Probabilistic Concept Bottleneck Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01574/) (2023)
- [Concept Embedding Models: Beyond the Accuracy-Explainability Trade-Off](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09056/) (2022)
- [Incremental Residual Concept Bottleneck Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08978/) (2024)
- [Aligning Human Knowledge with Visual Concepts Towards Explainable Medical Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05596/) (2024)
- [Self-eXplainable AI for Medical Image Analysis: A Survey and New Outlooks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02331/) (2024)

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

- [End-to-end Feature Alignment: A Simple CNN with Intrinsic Class Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25798/) (2026)
- [FMVP: Masked Flow Matching for Adversarial Video Purification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02228/) (2026)
- [Towards Fine-Grained and Verifiable Concept Bottleneck Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14210/) (2026)
- [Measuring What Matters: Synthetic Benchmarks for Concept Bottleneck Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04326/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The concept bottleneck model (CBM), as a technique improving interpretability via linking predictions to human-understandable concepts, makes high-risk and life-critical medical image classification credible. Typically, existing CBM methods associate the final layer of visual encoders with concepts to explain the model's predictions. However, we empirically discover the phenomenon of concept preference variation, that is, the concepts are preferably associated with the features at different layers than those only at the final layer; yet a blind last-layer-based association neglects such a preference variation and thus weakens the accurate correspondences between features and concepts, impairing model interpretability. To address this issue, we propose a novel Multi-layer Visual Preference-enhanced Concept Bottleneck Model (MVP-CBM), which comprises two key novel modules: (1) intra-layer concept preference modeling, which captures the preferred association of different concepts with features at various visual layers, and (2) multi-layer concept sparse activation fusion, which sparsely aggregates concept activations from multiple layers to enhance performance. Thus, by explicitly modeling concept preferences, MVP-CBM can comprehensively leverage multi-layer visual information to provide a more nuanced and accurate explanation of model decisions. Extensive experiments on several public medical classification benchmarks demonstrate that MVP-CBM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and interoperability, verifying its superiority. Code is available at https://github.com/wcj6/MVP-CBM.