Beyond Points: Spherical Distributional Part Prototypes for Interpretable Classification

arXiv:2606.27582v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prototype-based neural networks aim to provide intrinsic interpretability by grounding predictions in a small set of part prototypes. However, modern vision backbones typically operate in normalized, directional embedding spaces where each semantic part exhibits substantial intra-class variability. As a result, point prototypes often become redundant or unstable, hurting both explanation quality and robustness. We propose vMFProto, a distributional...