Maguelonne Heritier

Mahdi Alehdaghi, Rajarshi Bhattacharya, Pourya Shamsolmoali et al.

As AI systems grow more capable, it becomes increasingly important that their decisions remain understandable and aligned with human expectations. A key challenge is the limited interpretability of deep models. Post-hoc methods like GradCAM offer heatmaps but provide limited conceptual insight, while prototype-based approaches offer example-based explanations but often rely on rigid region selection and lack semantic consistency. To address these limitations, we propose PCMNet, a part-prototypical concept mining network that learns human-comprehensible prototypes from meaningful image regions without additional supervision. By clustering these prototypes into concept groups and extracting concept activation vectors, PCMNet provides structured, concept-level explanations and enhances robustness to occlusion and challenging conditions, which are both critical for building reliable and aligned AI systems. Experiments across multiple image classification benchmarks show that PCMNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods in interpretability, stability, and robustness. This work contributes to AI alignment by enhancing transparency, controllability, and trustworthiness in AI systems. Our code is available at: https://github.com/alehdaghi/PCMNet.

Shakeeb Murtaza, Aryan Shukla, Rajarshi Bhattacharya et al.

Text-to-image person re-identification (TI-ReID) relies on natural-language text description to retrieve top matching individuals from a large gallery of images. While recent large vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong retrieval performance, their decisions remain largely uninterpretable. Existing interpretability approaches in TI-ReID rely solely on slot-attention to highlight attended regions, but fail to reliably bind visual regions to semantically meaningful concepts, limiting explanations to qualitative visualizations over a restricted vocabulary. This paper introduces InterPartAbility, an interpretable TI-ReID method that performs explicit part-wise matching and enables phrase-region grounding. A new open-vocabulary, lightweight supervision, patch-phrase interaction module (PPIM) is proposed to train a standard TI-ReID model with concept-level guidance. Concept-based part phrases provide evidence that encourages the model to attend to corresponding image regions. InterPartAbility further constrains CLIP ViT self-attention to produce spatially concentrated patch activations aligned with each part-level phrase, yielding grounded explanation maps. A quantitative interpretability protocol for TI-ReID is introduced by adapting perturbation-based evaluation metrics, including counterfactual region masking that measures retrieval degradation when top-ranked explanatory regions are removed. Empirical results\footnote{Our code is included in the supplementary materials and will be made public.} on challenging benchmarks like CUHK-PEDES and ICFG-PEDES show that InterPartAbility achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) interpretability performance under these metrics, while sustaining competitive retrieval accuracy.

Rajarshi Bhattacharya, Shakeeb Murtaza, Christian Desrosiers et al.

Person re-identification (ReID) models are known to suffer from camera bias, where learned representations cluster according to camera viewpoints rather than identity, leading to significant performance degradation under (inter-camera) domain shifts in real-world surveillance systems when new cameras are added to camera networks. State-of-the-art test-time adaptation (TTA) methods, largely designed for classification tasks, rely on classification entropy-based objectives that fail to generalize well to ReID, thus making them unsuitable for tackling camera bias. In this paper, we introduce DART$^3$, a TTA framework specifically designed to mitigate camera-induced domain shifts in person ReID. DART$^3$ (Distance-Aware Retrieval Tuning at Test Time) leverages a distance-based objective that aligns better with image retrieval tasks like ReID by exploiting the correlation between nearest-neighbor distance and prediction error. Unlike prior ReID-specific domain adaptation methods, DART$^3$ requires no source data, architectural modifications, or retraining, and can be deployed in both fully black-box and hybrid settings. Empirical evaluations on multiple ReID benchmarks indicate that DART$^3$ and DART$^3$ LITE, a lightweight alternative to the approach, consistently outperforms state-of-the-art TTA baselines, making for a viable option to online learning to mitigate the adverse effects of camera bias.