U-CECE: A Universal Multi-Resolution Framework for Conceptual Counterfactual Explanations

As AI models grow more complex, explainability is essential for building trust, yet concept-based counterfactual methods still face a trade-off between expressivity and efficiency. Representing underlying concepts as atomic sets is fast but misses relational context, whereas full graph representations are more faithful but require solving the NP-hard Graph Edit Distance (GED) problem. We propose U-CECE, a unified, model-agnostic multi-resolution framework for conceptual counterfactual explanations that adapts to data regime and compute budget. U-CECE spans three levels of expressivity: atomic concepts for broad explanations, relational sets-of-sets for simple interactions, and structural graphs for full semantic structure. At the structural level, both a precision-oriented transductive mode based on supervised Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and a scalable inductive mode based on unsupervised graph autoencoders (GAEs) are supported. Experiments on the structurally divergent CUB and Visual Genome datasets characterize the efficiency-expressivity trade-off across levels, while human surveys and LVLM-based evaluation show that the retrieved structural counterfactuals are semantically equivalent to, and often preferred over, exact GED-based ground-truth explanations.

Through the PRISm: Importance-Aware Scene Graphs for Image Retrieval

Accurately retrieving images that are semantically similar remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision, as traditional methods often fail to capture the relational and contextual nuances of a scene. We introduce PRISm (Pruning-based Image Retrieval via Importance Prediction on Semantic Graphs), a multimodal framework that advances image-to-image retrieval through two novel components. First, the Importance Prediction Module identifies and retains the most critical objects and relational triplets within an image while pruning irrelevant elements. Second, the Edge-Aware Graph Neural Network explicitly encodes relational structure and integrates global visual features to produce semantically informed image embeddings. PRISm achieves image retrieval that closely aligns with human perception by explicitly modeling the semantic importance of objects and their interactions, capabilities largely absent in prior approaches. Its architecture effectively combines relational reasoning with visual representation, enabling semantically grounded retrieval. Extensive experiments on benchmark and real-world datasets demonstrate consistently superior top-ranked performance, while qualitative analyses show that PRISm accurately captures key objects and interactions, producing interpretable and semantically meaningful results.

SCENIR: Visual Semantic Clarity through Unsupervised Scene Graph Retrieval

Despite the dominance of convolutional and transformer-based architectures in image-to-image retrieval, these models are prone to biases arising from low-level visual features, such as color. Recognizing the lack of semantic understanding as a key limitation, we propose a novel scene graph-based retrieval framework that emphasizes semantic content over superficial image characteristics. Prior approaches to scene graph retrieval predominantly rely on supervised Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which require ground truth graph pairs driven from image captions. However, the inconsistency of caption-based supervision stemming from variable text encodings undermine retrieval reliability. To address these, we present SCENIR, a Graph Autoencoder-based unsupervised retrieval framework, which eliminates the dependence on labeled training data. Our model demonstrates superior performance across metrics and runtime efficiency, outperforming existing vision-based, multimodal, and supervised GNN approaches. We further advocate for Graph Edit Distance (GED) as a deterministic and robust ground truth measure for scene graph similarity, replacing the inconsistent caption-based alternatives for the first time in image-to-image retrieval evaluation. Finally, we validate the generalizability of our method by applying it to unannotated datasets via automated scene graph generation, while substantially contributing in advancing state-of-the-art in counterfactual image retrieval.

Explaining Vision GNNs: A Semantic and Visual Analysis of Graph-based Image Classification

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as an efficient alternative to convolutional approaches for vision tasks such as image classification, leveraging patch-based representations instead of raw pixels. These methods construct graphs where image patches serve as nodes, and edges are established based on patch similarity or classification relevance. Despite their efficiency, the explainability of GNN-based vision models remains underexplored, even though graphs are naturally interpretable. In this work, we analyze the semantic consistency of the graphs formed at different layers of GNN-based image classifiers, focusing on how well they preserve object structures and meaningful relationships. A comprehensive analysis is presented by quantifying the extent to which inter-layer graph connections reflect semantic similarity and spatial coherence. Explanations from standard and adversarial settings are also compared to assess whether they reflect the classifiers' robustness. Additionally, we visualize the flow of information across layers through heatmap-based visualization techniques, thereby highlighting the models' explainability. Our findings demonstrate that the decision-making processes of these models can be effectively explained, while also revealing that their reasoning does not necessarily align with human perception, especially in deeper layers.

Graph Edits for Counterfactual Explanations: A Unified GNN Approach

Counterfactuals have been established as a popular explainability technique which leverages a set of minimal edits to alter the prediction of a classifier. When considering conceptual counterfactuals, the edits requested should correspond to salient concepts present in the input data. At the same time, conceptual distances are defined by knowledge graphs, ensuring the optimality of conceptual edits. In this work, we extend previous endeavors on conceptual counterfactuals by introducing \textit{graph edits as counterfactual explanations}: should we represent input data as graphs, which is the shortest graph edit path that results in an alternative classification label as provided by a black-box classifier?