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Victor Boutin

11 accepted papers

2026

Cross-Modal Redundancy and the Geometry of Vision–Language Embeddings

ICLR 2026poster

Vision–language models (VLMs) align images and text with remarkable success, yet the geometry of their shared embedding space remains poorly understood. To probe this geometry, we begin from the Iso-Energy Assumption, which exploits cross-modal redundancy: a concept that is truly shared should exhi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Archetypal SAE: Adaptive and Stable Dictionary Learning for Concept Extraction in Large Vision Models

ICML 2025poster

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful framework for machine learning interpretability, enabling the unsupervised decomposition of model representations into a dictionary of abstract, human-interpretable concepts. However, we reveal a fundamental limitation: SAEs exhibit severe instab…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

ConSim: Measuring Concept-Based Explanations’ Effectiveness with Automated Simulatability

ACL 2025long

Concept-based explanations work by mapping complex model computations to human-understandable concepts. Evaluating such explanations is very difficult, as it includes not only the quality of the induced space of possible concepts but also how effectively the chosen concepts are communicated to users…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Deep Sturm–Liouville: From Sample-Based to 1D Regularization with Learnable Orthogonal Basis Functions

ICML 2025poster

Although Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have achieved remarkable success across various tasks, they still suffer from limited generalization. We hypothesize that this limitation arises from the traditional sample-based (0--dimensionnal) regularization used in ANNs. To overcome this, we introduce…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Follow the Energy, Find the Path: Riemannian Metrics from Energy-Based Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

What is the shortest path between two data points lying in a high-dimensional space? While the answer is trivial in Euclidean geometry, it becomes significantly more complex when the data lies on a curved manifold—requiring a Riemannian metric to describe the space's local curvature. Estimating such…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Latent Representation Matters: Human-like Sketches in One-shot Drawing Tasks

NeurIPS 2024poster

Humans can effortlessly draw new categories from a single exemplar, a feat that has long posed a challenge for generative models. However, this gap has started to close with recent advances in diffusion models. This one-shot drawing task requires powerful inductive biases that have not been systemat…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Saliency strikes back: How filtering out high frequencies improves white-box explanations

ICML 2024poster

Attribution methods correspond to a class of explainability methods (XAI) that aim to assess how individual inputs contribute to a model's decision-making process. We have identified a significant limitation in one type of attribution methods, known as ``white-box" methods. Although highly efficient…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2023

A Holistic Approach to Unifying Automatic Concept Extraction and Concept Importance Estimation

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

In recent years, concept-based approaches have emerged as some of the most promising explainability methods to help us interpret the decisions of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). These methods seek to discover intelligible visual ``concepts'' buried within the complex patterns of ANN activations i…

Cited by 56SourcePDFScholar
2023

Diffusion Models as Artists: Are we Closing the Gap between Humans and Machines?

ICML 2023oral

An important milestone for AI is the development of algorithms that can produce drawings that are indistinguishable from those of humans. Here, we adapt the ''diversity vs. recognizability'' scoring framework from Boutin et al (2022) and find that one-shot diffusion models have indeed started to clo…

2023

Unlocking Feature Visualization for Deep Network with MAgnitude Constrained Optimization

NeurIPS 2023poster

Feature visualization has gained significant popularity as an explainability method, particularly after the influential work by Olah et al. in 2017. Despite its success, its widespread adoption has been limited due to issues in scaling to deeper neural networks and the reliance on tricks to generate…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2022

Diversity vs. Recognizability: Human-like generalization in one-shot generative models

NeurIPS 2022accept

Robust generalization to new concepts has long remained a distinctive feature of human intelligence. However, recent progress in deep generative models has now led to neural architectures capable of synthesizing novel instances of unknown visual concepts from a single training example. Yet, a more p…