{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/neural-prototype-trees-for-interpretable-fine","title":"Neural Prototype Trees for Interpretable Fine-grained Image Recognition","arxiv_id":"2012.02046","date":"2020-12-03","proceeding":"CVPR 2021 1","authors":["Meike Nauta","Ron van Bree","Christin Seifert"],"abstract":"Prototype-based methods use interpretable representations to address the black-box nature of deep learning models, in contrast to post-hoc explanation methods that only approximate such models. We propose the Neural Prototype Tree (ProtoTree), an intrinsically interpretable deep learning method for fine-grained image recognition. ProtoTree combines prototype learning with decision trees, and thus results in a globally interpretable model by design. Additionally, ProtoTree can locally explain a single prediction by outlining a decision path through the tree. Each node in our binary tree contains a trainable prototypical part. The presence or absence of this learned prototype in an image determines the routing through a node. Decision making is therefore similar to human reasoning: Does the bird have a red throat? And an elongated beak? Then it's a hummingbird! We tune the accuracy-interpretability trade-off using ensemble methods, pruning and binarizing. We apply pruning without sacrificing accuracy, resulting in a small tree with only 8 learned prototypes along a path to classify a bird from 200 species. An ensemble of 5 ProtoTrees achieves competitive accuracy on the CUB-200- 2011 and Stanford Cars data sets. Code is available at https://github.com/M-Nauta/ProtoTree","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.02046v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.02046v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"neural-prototype-trees-for-interpretable-fine","repo_url":"https://github.com/M-Nauta/ProtoTree","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"unanswered"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decision-making","task_name":"Decision Making"},{"task_slug":"fine-grained-image-recognition","task_name":"Fine-Grained Image Recognition"},{"task_slug":"interpretable-machine-learning","task_name":"Interpretable Machine Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"pruning","method_name":"Pruning"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2012.02046","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}