Prototypical parts networks combine the power of deep learning with the explainability of case-based reasoning to make accurate, interpretable decisions. They follow the this looks like that reasoning, representing each prototypical part with patches from training images. However, a single image patch comprises multiple visual features, such as color, shape, and texture, making it difficult for users to identify which feature is important to the model. To reduce this ambiguity, we introduce the Lucid Prototypical Parts Network (LucidPPN), a novel prototypical parts network that separates color prototypes from other visual features. Our method employs two reasoning branches: one for non-color visual features, processing grayscale images, and another focusing solely on color information. This separation allows us to clarify whether the model's decisions are based on color, shape, or texture. Additionally, LucidPPN identifies prototypical parts corresponding to semantic parts of classified objects, making comparisons between data classes more intuitive, e.g., when two bird species might differ primarily in belly color. Our experiments demonstrate that the two branches are complementary and together achieve results comparable to baseline methods. More importantly, LucidPPN generates less ambiguous prototypical parts, enhancing user understanding.

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have recently gained attention as a means to improve the interpretability and steerability of Large Language Models (LLMs), both of which are essential for AI safety. In this work, we extend the application of SAEs to Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, and introduce a comprehensive framework for evaluating monosemanticity at the neuron-level in visual representations. To ensure that our evaluation aligns with human perception, we propose a benchmark derived from a large-scale user study. Our experimental results reveal that SAEs trained on VLMs significantly enhance the monosemanticity of individual neurons, with sparsity and wide latents being the most influential factors. Further, we demonstrate that applying SAE interventions on CLIP's vision encoder directly steers multimodal LLM outputs (e.g., LLaVA), without any modifications to the underlying language model. These findings emphasize the practicality and efficacy of SAEs as an unsupervised tool for enhancing both interpretability and control of VLMs. Code and benchmark data are available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/sae-for-vlm.

Active Visual Exploration (AVE) optimizes the utilization of robotic resources in real-world scenarios by sequentially selecting the most informative observations. However, modern methods require a high computational budget due to processing the same observations multiple times through the autoencoder transformers. As a remedy, we introduce a novel approach to AVE called TOken REcycling (TORE). It divides the encoder into extractor and aggregator components. The extractor processes each observation sepa-rately, enabling the reuse of tokens passed to the aggrega-tor. Moreover, to further reduce the computations, we de-crease the decoder to only one block. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that TORE outperforms state-of-the-art methods while reducing computational overhead by up to 90%.