XCoOp: Explainable Prompt Learning for Computer-Aided Diagnosis via Concept-guided Context Optimization

Abstract

Utilizing potent representations of the large vision-language models (VLMs) to accomplish various downstream tasks has attracted increasing attention. Within this research field, soft prompt learning has become a representative approach for efficiently adapting VLMs such as CLIP, to tasks like image classification. However, most existing prompt learning methods learn text tokens that are unexplainable, which cannot satisfy the stringent interpretability requirements of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in high-stakes scenarios like healthcare. To address this issue, we propose a novel explainable prompt learning framework that leverages medical knowledge by aligning the semantics of images, learnable prompts, and clinical concept-driven prompts at multiple granularities. Moreover, our framework addresses the lack of valuable concept annotations by eliciting knowledge from large language models and offers both visual and textual explanations for the prompts. Extensive experiments and explainability analyses conducted on various datasets, with and without concept labels, demonstrate that our method simultaneously achieves superior diagnostic performance, flexibility, and interpretability, shedding light on the effectiveness of foundation models in facilitating XAI. The code will be made publically available.