Prototype-based methods enhance interpretability in image recognition by establishing intermediate part-level prototypes to build interpretable classifiers, enabling transparent decision-making through localized evidence and reference to prototypical examples. However, most existing methods typically depend on unimodal visual supervision and constrain prototypes within the visual embedding space, which inherently restricts their alignment with language-conditioned semantic representations. In this paper, we present PRISM (Prototype-based Reasoning with Inter-modal Semantic Mining), a framework for interpretable image recognition that leverages natural language as an auxiliary modality to guide the learning of class-specific part prototypes. PRISM introduces an information-theoretic attribution mechanism to extract semantically relevant image regions conditioned on textual descriptions. By aligning attribution maps with prototype activation patterns, PRISM implicitly anchors visual part prototypes to semantically meaningful image regions without requiring explicit concept annotations. To promote better localization and reduce redundancy among prototypes, we introduce a spatial compactness constraint that encourages each prototype to attend to non-overlapping and spatially concentrated regions. Experiments on multiple fine-grained benchmarks demonstrate that PRISM not only improves classification performance but also provides faithful and semantically grounded visual explanations.
cs.CV
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表
In the deep-learning-based computer vision community, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has become the de-facto tool for acquiring task-optimal network structures. Nevertheless, NAS methods are trapped in a fundamental accuracy-efficiency dilemma: training-based approaches deliver reliable performance but incur prohibitive search costs, whereas training-free strategies are ultra-fast but often yield relatively unreliable rankings. To reconcile this conflict, we propose a vision-oriented lightweight training-based NAS framework. We first design six micro vision tasks whose training time is negligible, yet together they probe a broad spectrum of representational capacities. Built upon these tasks, we introduce a budget-adaptive performance evaluator to produce the most accurate ranking attainable within the limit. Experiments on popular NAS benchmarks show that our method achieves a ranking correlation higher than existing methods. Furthermore, we construct a search space from prevalent neural blocks and run our method at a cost close to training-free methods; the discovered architecture surpasses the current state-of-the-art under identical training recipes. Our codes are available at https://github.com/fanyi-plus/tf-nas.
cs.CV
Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026 · 正式发表