# CFM: Language-aligned Concept Foundation Model for Vision

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13798 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13798/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jan 2026.

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

- [VisualScratchpad: Inference-time Visual Concepts Analysis in Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07335/) (2026)
- [Do Sparse Autoencoders Learn Meaningful Concept Hierarchies?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22994/) (2026)
- [GraSP-VL: Length as a Semantic Granularity Interface for Vision-Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17727/) (2026)
- [Interpretability Without Tradeoffs: Disentangling Polysemanticity At Equal Predictive Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31304/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Language-aligned vision foundation models perform strongly across diverse downstream tasks. Yet, their learned representations remain opaque, making interpreting their decision-making difficult. Recent work decompose these representations into human-interpretable concepts, but provide poor spatial grounding and are limited to image classification tasks. In this work, we propose CFM, a language-aligned concept foundation model for vision that provides fine-grained concepts, which are human-interpretable and spatially grounded in the input image. When paired with a foundation model with strong semantic representations, we get explanations for any of its downstream tasks. Examining local co-occurrence dependencies of concepts allows us to define concept relationships through which we improve concept naming and obtain richer explanations. On benchmark data, we show that CFM provides performance on classification, segmentation, and captioning that is competitive with opaque foundation models while providing fine-grained, high quality concept-based explanations. Code at https://github.com/kawi19/CFM. Interactive visualizations at https://concept-foundation-model.mpi-inf.mpg.de.