[2605.12639] OceanCBM: A Concept Bottleneck Model for Mechanistic Interpretability in Ocean Forecasting
[Submitted on 12 May 2026]
Title:OceanCBM: A Concept Bottleneck Model for Mechanistic Interpretability in Ocean Forecasting
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Abstract:Extreme ocean phenomena are challenging not only to predict but to diagnose, as accurate forecasts alone do not reveal the underlying physical drivers. While recent machine learning approaches achieve strong predictive skill, they remain largely opaque and provide limited guarantees of fidelity to ground-truth physics. We introduce OceanCBM, the first concept bottleneck model (CBM) for spatiotemporal prediction and mechanistic interrogation of ocean dynamics. OceanCBM uses mixed supervision to predict mixed layer heat content, a key precursor of marine heatwaves, while routing information through an intermediate layer of prescribed concepts derived from geophysical fluid dynamics and a 'free' concept. This design imposes soft physical structure without over-constraining the model, and the free concept both regularizes concept predictions and captures residual physical processes. Across ensemble initializations, we show that mixed supervision yields consistent mechanistic representations, whereas prediction-only and prescription-only baselines learn highly variable latent structures despite similar predictive performance. OceanCBM achieves interpretable, physically grounded representations without sacrificing skill, explicitly characterizing the interpretability-performance trade-off.
Comments: 17 pages, 9 figures, 4 tables
Subjects:
Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as: arXiv:2605.12639 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2605.12639v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.12639
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Sanah Suri [view email] [v1] Tue, 12 May 2026 18:29:45 UTC (4,234 KB)
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