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Pietro Barbiero

22 accepted papers

2026

Mixture of Concept Bottleneck Experts

ICML 2026spotlight

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) promote interpretability by grounding predictions in human-understandable concepts. However, existing CBMs typically fix their task predictor to a single linear or Boolean expression, limiting both predictive accuracy and adaptability to diverse user needs. We propos…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Position: Interpretability in Deep Time Series Models Demands Semantic Alignment

ICML 2026poster

Deep time series models continue to improve predictive performance, yet their deployment remains limited by their black-box nature. In response, existing interpretability approaches in the field keep focusing on explaining the internal model computations, without addressing whether they align or not…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Prototype-Grounded Concept Models for Verifiable Concept Alignment

ICML 2026poster

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) aim to improve interpretability by mediating predictions through human-understandable concepts, but they provide no way to verify whether learned concepts align with the human's intended meaning, hurting interpretability. We introduce Prototype-Grounded Concept Model…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Avoiding Leakage Poisoning: Concept Interventions Under Distribution Shifts

ICML 2025poster

In this paper, we investigate how concept-based models (CMs) respond to out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs. CMs are interpretable neural architectures that first predict a set of high-level *concepts* (e.g., "stripes", "black") and then predict a task label from those concepts. In particular, we study…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Causal Concept Graph Models: Beyond Causal Opacity in Deep Learning

ICLR 2025poster

Causal opacity denotes the difficulty in understanding the "hidden" causal structure underlying the decisions of deep neural network (DNN) models. This leads to the inability to rely on and verify state-of-the-art DNN-based systems, especially in high-stakes scenarios. For this reason, circumventing…

2025

Causally Reliable Concept Bottleneck Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Concept-based models are an emerging paradigm in deep learning that constrains the inference process to operate through human-interpretable variables, facilitating explainability and human interaction. However, these architectures, on par with popular opaque neural models, fail to account for the tr…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Counterfactual Concept Bottleneck Models

ICLR 2025poster

Current deep learning models are not designed to simultaneously address three fundamental questions: predict class labels to solve a given classification task (the "What?"), simulate changes in the situation to evaluate how this impacts class predictions (the "How?"), and imagine how the scenario sh…

2025

Deferring Concept Bottleneck Models: Learning to Defer Interventions to Inaccurate Experts

NeurIPS 2025poster

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) are interpretable machine learning models that ground their predictions on human-understandable concepts, allowing for targeted interventions in their decision-making process. However, when intervened on, CBMs assume the availability of humans that can identify the n…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

FLUX: Efficient Descriptor-Driven Clustered Federated Learning under Arbitrary Distribution Shifts

NeurIPS 2025poster

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across multiple clients while preserving data privacy. Traditional FL methods often use a global model to fit all clients, assuming that clients' data are independent and identically distributed (IID). However, when this assumption does no…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Scalable Evaluation and Neural Models for Compositional Generalization

NeurIPS 2025poster

Compositional generalization—a key open challenge in modern machine learning—requires models to predict unknown combinations of known concepts. However, assessing compositional generalization remains a fundamental challenge due to the lack of standardized evaluation protocols and the limitations of…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Federated Behavioural Planes: Explaining the Evolution of Client Behaviour in Federated Learning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Federated Learning (FL), a privacy-aware approach in distributed deep learning environments, enables many clients to collaboratively train a model without sharing sensitive data, thereby reducing privacy risks. However, enabling human trust and control over FL systems requires understanding the evol…

2024

Interpretable Concept-Based Memory Reasoning

NeurIPS 2024poster

The lack of transparency in the decision-making processes of deep learning systems presents a significant challenge in modern artificial intelligence (AI), as it impairs users’ ability to rely on and verify these systems. To address this challenge, Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) have made signific…

2024

Relational Concept Bottleneck Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

The design of interpretable deep learning models working in relational domains poses an open challenge: interpretable deep learning methods, such as Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), are not designed to solve relational problems, while relational deep learning models, such as Graph Neural Networks (…

2023

Global Concept-Based Interpretability for Graph Neural Networks via Neuron Analysis

AAAI 2023technical

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are highly effective on a variety of graph-related tasks; however, they lack interpretability and transparency. Current explainability approaches are typically local and treat GNNs as black-boxes. They do not look inside the model, inhibiting human trust in the model and…

2023

Global Explainability of GNNs via Logic Combination of Learned Concepts

ICLR 2023poster

While instance-level explanation of GNN is a well-studied problem with plenty of approaches being developed, providing a global explanation for the behaviour of a GNN is much less explored, despite its potential in interpretability and debugging. Existing solutions either simply list local explanati…

2023

Interpretable Graph Networks Formulate Universal Algebra Conjectures

NeurIPS 2023poster

The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) recently empowered researchers to investigate hard mathematical problems which eluded traditional approaches for decades. Yet, the use of AI in Universal Algebra (UA)---one of the fields laying the foundations of modern mathematics---is still completely unexp…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2023

Interpretable Neural-Symbolic Concept Reasoning

ICML 2023poster

Deep learning methods are highly accurate, yet their opaque decision process prevents them from earning full human trust. Concept-based models aim to address this issue by learning tasks based on a set of human-understandable concepts. However, state-of-the-art concept-based models rely on high-dime…

2023

Towards Robust Metrics for Concept Representation Evaluation

AAAI 2023technical

Recent work on interpretability has focused on concept-based explanations, where deep learning models are explained in terms of high-level units of information, referred to as concepts. Concept learning models, however, have been shown to be prone to encoding impurities in their representations, fai…

2022

Algorithmic Concept-Based Explainable Reasoning

AAAI 2022technical

Recent research on graph neural network (GNN) models successfully applied GNNs to classical graph algorithms and combinatorial optimisation problems. This has numerous benefits, such as allowing applications of algorithms when preconditions are not satisfied, or reusing learned models when sufficien…

2022

Concept Embedding Models: Beyond the Accuracy-Explainability Trade-Off

NeurIPS 2022accept

Deploying AI-powered systems requires trustworthy models supporting effective human interactions, going beyond raw prediction accuracy. Concept bottleneck models promote trustworthiness by conditioning classification tasks on an intermediate level of human-like concepts. This enables human intervent…

2022

Entropy-Based Logic Explanations of Neural Networks

AAAI 2022technical

Explainable artificial intelligence has rapidly emerged since lawmakers have started requiring interpretable models for safety-critical domains. Concept-based neural networks have arisen as explainable-by-design methods as they leverage human-understandable symbols (i.e. concepts) to predict class m…

2022

Extending Logic Explained Networks to Text Classification

EMNLP 2022main

Recently, Logic Explained Networks (LENs) have been proposed as explainable-by-design neural models providing logic explanations for their predictions.However, these models have only been applied to vision and tabular data, and they mostly favour the generation of global explanations, while local on…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar