OPTIMUS-Prime: Minimal and Sufficient Concept Explanations for Deep Vision Models
For practitioners and researchers needing trustworthy explanations in computer vision, OPTIMUS provides the first concept-based method with formal guarantees of sufficiency and minimality, addressing a gap between practical utility and theoretical rigor.
OPTIMUS introduces concept-based visual explanations for deep vision models that satisfy formal guarantees of sufficiency and minimality, grounded in prime implicant theory. The method produces heatmaps that are both logically tight and visually coherent, validated on a visual classification benchmark.
The growing demand for transparency in automated decision-making has propelled eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) to the forefront of machine learning research. In computer vision, however, existing explanation methods often prioritize end-user accessibility at the expense of formal guarantees, leaving a critical gap between practical utility and theoretical rigor. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing OPTIMUS, a novel framework for generating concept-based visual explanations for deep classification models. OPTIMUS explanations take the form of visual heatmaps that not only remain interpretable to end users, but are grounded in the well-established theory of prime implicants, providing formal guarantees that have been largely absent from existing saliency-based methods. Specifically, OPTIMUS explanations satisfy two desirable properties: sufficiency, ensuring that the highlighted concepts provably guarantee the classifier's prediction, and minimality, ensuring that no strict subset of those concepts retains this guarantee. Together, these properties yield explanations that are both logically tight and visually coherent. We validate our approach on a visual classification benchmark, demonstrating that OPTIMUS heatmaps naturally and faithfully surface the decision-relevant concepts underlying model predictions.