Enhancing Bottleneck Concept Learning in Image Classification

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in image classification. However, their "black-box" nature raises concerns about trust and transparency, particularly in high-stakes fields such as healthcare and autonomous systems. While explainable AI (XAI) methods attempt to address these concerns through feature- or concept-based explanations, existing approaches are often limited by the need for manually defined concepts, overly abstract granularity, or misalignment with human semantics. This paper introduces the Enhanced Bottleneck Concept Learner (E-BotCL), a self-supervised framework that autonomously discovers task-relevant, interpretable semantic concepts via a dual-path contrastive learning strategy and multi-task regularization. By combining contrastive learning to build robust concept prototypes, attention mechanisms for spatial localization, and feature aggregation to activate concepts, E-BotCL enables end-to-end concept learning and classification without requiring human supervision. Experiments conducted on the CUB200 and ImageNet datasets demonstrated that E-BotCL significantly enhanced interpretability while maintaining classification accuracy. Specifically, two interpretability metrics, the Concept Discovery Rate (CDR) and Concept Consistency (CC), improved by 0.6104 and 0.4486, respectively. This work advances the balance between model performance and transparency, offering a scalable solution for interpretable decision-making in complex vision tasks.