  The proposed framework named IDEAL (Interpretable-by-design DEep learning
ALgorithms) recasts the standard supervised classification problem into a
function of similarity to a set of prototypes derived from the training data,
while taking advantage of existing latent spaces of large neural networks
forming so-called Foundation Models (FM). This addresses the issue of
explainability (stage B) while retaining the benefits from the tremendous
achievements offered by DL models (e.g., visual transformers, ViT) pre-trained
on huge data sets such as IG-3.6B + ImageNet-1K or LVD-142M (stage A). We show
that one can turn such DL models into conceptually simpler,
explainable-through-prototypes ones.
  The key findings can be summarized as follows: (1) the proposed models are
interpretable through prototypes, mitigating the issue of confounded
interpretations, (2) the proposed IDEAL framework circumvents the issue of
catastrophic forgetting allowing efficient class-incremental learning, and (3)
the proposed IDEAL approach demonstrates that ViT architectures narrow the gap
between finetuned and non-finetuned models allowing for transfer learning in a
fraction of time \textbf{without} finetuning of the feature space on a target
dataset with iterative supervised methods.
