Towards Achieving Concept Completeness for Textual Concept Bottleneck Models

Milan Bhan, Yann Choho, Jean-Noël Vittaut, Nicolas Chesneau, Pierre Moreau, Marie-Jeanne Lesot


Abstract
This paper proposes Complete Textual Concept Bottleneck Model (CT-CBM), a novel TCBM generator building concept labels in a fully unsupervised manner using a small language model, eliminating both the need for predefined human labeled concepts and LLM annotations. CT-CBM iteratively targets and adds important and identifiable concepts in the bottleneck layer to create a complete concept basis. CT-CBM achieves striking results against competitors in terms of concept basis completeness and concept detection accuracy, offering a promising solution to reliably enhance interpretability of NLP classifiers.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.106
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2007–2024
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.106/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.106
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Milan Bhan, Yann Choho, Jean-Noël Vittaut, Nicolas Chesneau, Pierre Moreau, and Marie-Jeanne Lesot. 2025. Towards Achieving Concept Completeness for Textual Concept Bottleneck Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 2007–2024, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Achieving Concept Completeness for Textual Concept Bottleneck Models (Bhan et al., Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.106.pdf
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