Bayesian Concept Bottleneck Models with LLM Priors
Jean Feng, Avni Kothari, Lucas Zier, Chandan Singh, Yan Shuo Tan
Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) have been proposed as a compromise between white-box and black-box models, aiming to achieve interpretability without sacrificing accuracy.The standard training procedure for CBMs is to predefine a candidate set of human-interpretable concepts, extract their values from the training data, and identify a sparse subset as inputs to a transparent prediction model.However, such approaches are often hampered by the tradeoff between exploring a sufficiently large set of concepts versus controlling the cost of obtaining concept extractions, resulting in a large interpretability-accuracy tradeoff.This work investigates a novel approach that sidesteps these challenges: BC-LLM iteratively searches over a potentially infinite set of concepts within a Bayesian framework, in which Large Language Models (LLMs) serve as both a concept extraction mechanism and prior.Even though LLMs can be miscalibrated and hallucinate, we prove that BC-LLM can provide rigorous statistical inference and uncertainty quantification.Across image, text, and tabular datasets, BC-LLM outperforms interpretable baselines and even black-box models in certain settings, converges more rapidly towards relevant concepts, and is more robust to out-of-distribution samples.