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Wolfgang Stammer

15 accepted papers

2026

ActivationReasoning: Logical Reasoning in Latent Activation Spaces

ICLR 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) excel at generating fluent text, but their internal reasoning remains opaque and difficult to control. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) make hidden activations more interpretable by exposing latent features that often align with human concepts. Yet, these features are fragile…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Neural Concept Verifier: Scaling Prover-Verifier Games via Concept Encodings

ICML 2026spotlight

While *Prover-Verifier Games* (PVGs) offer a promising path toward verifiability in nonlinear classification models, they have not yet been applied to complex inputs such as high-dimensional images. Conversely, expressive *concept encodings* effectively allow to translate such data into interpretabl…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Rethinking Concept Bottleneck Models: From Pitfalls to Solutions

CVPR 2026

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) ground predictions in human-understandable concepts but face fundamental limitations: the absence of a metric to pre-evaluate concept relevance, the "linearity problem" causing recent CBMs to bypass the concept bottleneck entirely, an accuracy gap compared to opaque

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Synthesizing Visual Concepts as Vision-Language Programs

CVPR 2026

Vision-Language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on multimodal tasks but often fail at systematic visual reasoning, especially in inductive reasoning problems. Neuro-symbolic methods promise to address this by inducing interpretable logical programs from images, though they usually rely on r

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Bongard in Wonderland: Visual Puzzles that Still Make AI Go Mad?

ICML 2025poster

Recently, newly developed Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as OpenAI's o1, have emerged, seemingly demonstrating advanced reasoning capabilities across text and image modalities. However, the depth of these advances in language-guided perception and abstract reasoning remains underexplored, and i…

2025

Human-in-the-loop or AI-in-the-loop? Automate or Collaborate?

AAAI 2025technical

Human-in-the-loop (HIL) systems have emerged as a promising approach for combining the strengths of data-driven machine learning models with the contextual understanding of human experts. However, a deeper look into several of these systems reveals that calling them HIL would be a misnomer, as they…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Where is the Truth? The Risk of Getting Confounded in a Continual World

ICML 2025spotlight

A dataset is confounded if it is most easily solved via a spurious correlation which fails to generalize to new data. In this work, we show that, in a continual learning setting where confounders may vary in time across tasks, the challenge of mitigating the effect of confounders far exceeds the sta…

2024

Interpretable Concept Bottlenecks to Align Reinforcement Learning Agents

NeurIPS 2024poster

Goal misalignment, reward sparsity and difficult credit assignment are only a few of the many issues that make it difficult for deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn optimal policies. Unfortunately, the black-box nature of deep neural networks impedes the inclusion of domain experts for…

2024

Learning to Intervene on Concept Bottlenecks

ICML 2024poster

While deep learning models often lack interpretability, concept bottleneck models (CBMs) provide inherent explanations via their concept representations. Moreover, they allow users to perform interventional interactions on these concepts by updating the concept values and thus correcting the predict…

2024

Pix2Code: Learning to Compose Neural Visual Concepts as Programs

UAI 2024poster

The challenge in learning abstract concepts from images in an unsupervised fashion lies in the required integration of visual perception and generalizable relational reasoning. Moreover, the unsupervised nature of this task makes it necessary for human users to be able to understand a model’s learne…

2022

Interactive Disentanglement: Learning Concepts by Interacting With Their Prototype Representations

CVPR 2022poster

Learning visual concepts from raw images without strong supervision is a challenging task. In this work, we show the advantages of prototype representations for understanding and revising the latent space of neural concept learners. For this purpose, we introduce interactive Concept Swapping Network…

Cited by 29PDFcodeScholar
2021

Right for Better Reasons: Training Differentiable Models by Constraining their Influence Functions

AAAI 2021technical

Explaining black-box models such as deep neural networks is becoming increasingly important as it helps to boost trust and debugging. Popular forms of explanations map the features to a vector indicating their individual importance to a decision on the instance-level. They can then be used to preven…

Cited by 38SourcePDFScholar
2021

Right for the Right Concept: Revising Neuro-Symbolic Concepts by Interacting With Their Explanations

CVPR 2021poster

Most explanation methods in deep learning map importance estimates for a model's prediction back to the original input space. These "visual" explanations are often insufficient, as the model's actual concept remains elusive. Moreover, without insights into the model's semantic concept, it is difficu…

Cited by 121PDFcodeScholar