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Interpreting Clip with Sparse Linear Concept Embeddings (SpLiCE) (arxiv.org)
7 points by fzliu on Oct 4, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: CLIP turns images and text into dense number lists that are hard for people to read. This method rewrites each list as a short mix of everyday concepts, without any training, and still matches the original's accuracy on tasks like sorting images.

Abstract · Interpreting CLIP with Sparse Linear Concept Embeddings (SpLiCE)

CLIP embeddings have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of multimodal applications. However, these high-dimensional, dense vector representations are not easily interpretable, limiting our understanding of the rich structure of CLIP and its use in downstream applications that require transparency. In this work, we show that the semantic structure of CLIP's latent space can be leveraged to provide interpretability, allowing for the decomposition of representations into semantic concepts. We formulate this problem as one of sparse recovery and propose a novel method, Sparse Linear Concept Embeddings, for transforming CLIP representations into sparse linear combinations of human-interpretable concepts. Distinct from previous work, SpLiCE is task-agnostic and can be used, without training, to explain and even replace traditional dense CLIP representations, maintaining high downstream performance while significantly improving their interpretability. We also demonstrate significant use cases of SpLiCE representations including detecting spurious correlations and model editing.

Usha Bhalla, Alex Oesterling, Suraj Srinivas, Flavio P. Calmon, Himabindu Lakkaraju
arXiv:2402.10376 · cs.LG, cs.CV · submitted Feb 16, 2024 · updated Nov 4, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · 25 pages, 15 figures, NeurIPS 2024. Code is provided at https://github.com/AI4LIFE-GROUP/SpLiCE

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