# Concept-based Visual Counterfactual Explanations with Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22544 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.22544/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion foundations and sampling, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 35 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 May 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion foundations and sampling](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-foundations-and-sampling/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Sanity Checks for Saliency Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03292/) (2018)
- [Counterfactual Explanations without Opening the Black Box: Automated Decisions and the GDPR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00399/) (2017)
- [Concept Bottleneck Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04612/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Towards Medical XAI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07374/) (2019)
- [European Union regulations on algorithmic decision-making and a "right to explanation"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08813/) (2016)
- [Counterfactual Visual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07451/) (2019)
- [Opportunities and Challenges in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11371/) (2020)
- [Explaining in Style: Training a GAN to explain a classifier in StyleSpace](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13369/) (2021)
- [Counterfactual Generative Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06046/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Models for Counterfactual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15636/) (2022)
- [Adversarial Robustness on In- and Out-Distribution Improves Explainability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09461/) (2020)
- [Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Overview and Field Guide for Future Research Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11561/) (2021)
- [Explainable AI for Safe and Trustworthy Autonomous Driving: A Systematic Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10086/) (2024)
- [GANterfactual - Counterfactual Explanations for Medical Non-Experts using Generative Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11905/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Counterfactual Visual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09962/) (2023)
- [The Intriguing Relation Between Counterfactual Explanations and Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.05487/) (2020)
- [Fast Diffusion-Based Counterfactuals for Shortcut Removal and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14223/) (2023)
- [STEEX: Steering Counterfactual Explanations with Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09094/) (2021)
- [COCO-Counterfactuals: Automatically Constructed Counterfactual Examples for Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14356/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Visual counterfactual explanations aim to answer "what minimal change to this image would flip the model's prediction?", and are increasingly important as vision models are deployed in safety-critical domains (e.g., medicine). Existing diffusion-based methods can produce realistic edits, but they rely on external classifiers that must work reliably on noisy images, which makes them fragile and hard to deploy for robust explanations. We introduce C-VCE, a new diffusion framework that builds the classifier directly into the generative model via a concept bottleneck layer, so that counterfactuals are guided by human-interpretable features (concepts) instead of a separate noise robust classifier that works with pixel-level edits. Our model lets users to toggle on/off semantic concepts during sampling, then minimally adjusts relevant image regions, while preserving the rest of the image, respecting feature correlations. To keep edits small and controlled, we add a simple probabilistic regularizer that balances "change the prediction" against "stay close to the original", plus a gradient-based mask that confines modifications to the most relevant regions. On benchmarks such as CelebA, C-VCE matches or improves flip rates while producing counterfactuals that are visually closer to the input and less distorted than baselines that depend on separate noisy-image classifiers. These properties make C-VCE a practical tool for vision systems where users need concrete "what-if" images without having to trust an additional, noise-robust classifier. More broadly, our results suggest that exposing and controlling an internal concept layer is a promising way to make powerful generative models easier to understand and safer to use.