Explainable Visual Anomaly Detection via Concept Bottleneck Models

In recent years, VAD (Visual Anomaly Detection) has attracted significant attention due to its high interpretability, as it provides visual explanations by highlighting anomalous regions within an image. However, although these visual explanations can be helpful, they lack a direct and semantically meaningful interpretation for users. To address this limitation, we propose extending CBMs (Concept Bottleneck Models) to the VAD setting. By learning meaningful concepts, the network can provide human-interpretable descriptions of anomalies, offering a novel and more insightful way to explain them. Our main contributions are: (i) we introduce a concept-based framework for anomaly explanation by extending CBMs to the VAD setting for the first time; (ii) we evaluate multiple supervision regimes, ranging from supervised to unsupervised anomaly settings; (iii) we propose a dual-branch architecture that combines a CBM-based Concept branch for concept-level explanations with a Visual branch for pixel-level anomaly localization, bridging semantic and spatial interpretability. When evaluated across three well-established VAD benchmarks, our approach, Concept-Aware Visual Anomaly Detection, achieves performance comparable to classic VAD methods (up to 0.97 I-AUROC on MVTec AD) while providing richer, concept-driven explanations. A user study (582 responses) shows that explanations are rated effective in 73.5% of cases (vs. 60.7% for the SOTA VLM-based explainer Anomaly-OV) and misleading in only 3.1% (vs. 11.7%). Beyond explanation quality, CBMs enable human-in-the-loop correction: concept-level interventions further boost detection in the challenging unsupervised setting, closing part of the gap to fully supervised performance.