ConceptTracer: Interactive Analysis of Concept Saliency and Selectivity in Neural Representations

arXiv cs.LG / 4/9/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces ConceptTracer, an interactive tool designed to make neural network representations more interpretable by analyzing them through human-interpretable concepts.
  • ConceptTracer uses two information-theoretic metrics to measure concept saliency and selectivity, helping users find neurons that respond strongly to specific concepts.
  • The authors demonstrate the tool’s usefulness on representations learned by TabPFN, showing it can support the discovery of interpretable neurons.
  • ConceptTracer is positioned as a practical framework for studying how tabular foundation models encode concept-level information, and it is made available via GitHub.
  • The work targets the broader gap in systematic representation-exploration tools for neural networks, particularly for tabular foundation models.

Abstract

Neural networks deliver impressive predictive performance across a variety of tasks, but they are often opaque in their decision-making processes. Despite a growing interest in mechanistic interpretability, tools for systematically exploring the representations learned by neural networks in general, and tabular foundation models in particular, remain limited. In this work, we introduce ConceptTracer, an interactive application for analyzing neural representations through the lens of human-interpretable concepts. ConceptTracer integrates two information-theoretic measures that quantify concept saliency and selectivity, enabling researchers and practitioners to identify neurons that respond strongly to individual concepts. We demonstrate the utility of ConceptTracer on representations learned by TabPFN and show that our approach facilitates the discovery of interpretable neurons. Together, these capabilities provide a practical framework for investigating how neural networks like TabPFN encode concept-level information. ConceptTracer is available at https://github.com/ml-lab-htw/concept-tracer.