arXiv:2507.08334v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative concept bottleneck models aim to enable interpretable generation by routing synthesis through explicit, user-facing concepts. In practice, prior approaches often rely on non-explicit bottleneck representations (e.g., vision cues or opaque concept embeddings) or black-box decoders to preserve image quality, which weakens the transparency. We propose CoBELa (Concept Bottlenecks on Energy Landscapes), a decoder-free, energy-based framework that eliminates non-explicit bottleneck representations by conditioning generation entirely through per-concept energy functions over the latent space of a frozen pretrained generator-requiring no generator retraining and enabling post-hoc interpretation. Because these concept energies compose additively, CoBELa naturally supports compositional concept interventions: concept conjunction and negation are realized by summing or subtracting per-concept energy terms without additional training. A diffusion-scheduled energy guidance scheme further replaces expensive MCMC chains with more stable, scheduled denoising for efficient concept-steered sampling. Experiments on CelebA-HQ and CUB-200-2011 demonstrate improvements over prior concept bottleneck generative models, achieving 75.70%/82.42% concept accuracy and 6.47/5.37 FID, respectively, while enabling reliable multi-concept interventions.

arXiv:2602.16716v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Contextuality is a central feature of quantum theory, traditionally understood as the impossibility of reproducing quantum measurement statistics using noncontextual ontological models. We consider classical ontological models constrained to reuse a single ontic state space across multiple interventions. We prove an information-theoretic no-go theorem showing that such models must incur an irreducible contextual information cost: contextual dependence cannot be fully mediated through the ontic state alone and requires additional contextual information beyond it. We provide a constructive example illustrating this obstruction and show that it arises solely from the requirement of ontic state reuse within a classical probability space. We further explain how quantum theory avoids this obstruction by relaxing the assumption that all measurement statistics arise from a single underlying classical ontic variable. These results identify contextuality as a fundamental information-theoretic constraint on classical ontological models and clarify its origin as a limitation on classical representations.