Intrinsic Concept Extraction Based on Compositional Interpretability

Hanyu Shi, Hong Tao, Guoheng Huang, Jianbin Jiang, Xuhang Chen, Chi-Man Pun, Shanhu Wang, Pan Pan; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 38969-38978

Unsupervised Concept Extraction aims to extract concepts from a single image, yet existing methods suffer from the inability to extract composable intrinsic concepts. To address this, this paper introduces a new task called Compositional and Interpretable Intrinsic Concept Extraction (CI-ICE). The CI-ICE task aims to leverage diffusion-based text-to-image models to extract composable object-level and attribute-level concepts from a single image, such that the original concept can be reconstructed through the combination of these concepts. To achieve this goal, we propose a method called HyperExpress, which addresses the CI-ICE task through two core aspects. Specifically, first, we propose a concept learning approach that leverages the inherent hierarchical modeling capability of hyperbolic space to achieve accurate concept disentanglement while preserving the hierarchical structure and relational dependencies among concepts; second, we introduce a concept-wise optimization method that maps the concept embedding space to maintain complex inter-concept relationships while ensuring concept composability. Our method demonstrates outstanding performance in extracting compositionally interpretable intrinsic concepts from a single image.