Challenges and Opportunities in Improving Worst-Group Generalization in Presence of Spurious Features

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Hauptverfasser: Joshi, Siddharth, Yang, Yu, Xue, Yihao, Yang, Wenhan, Mirzasoleiman, Baharan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Joshi, Siddharth
Yang, Yu
Xue, Yihao
Yang, Wenhan
Mirzasoleiman, Baharan
author_facet Joshi, Siddharth
Yang, Yu
Xue, Yihao
Yang, Wenhan
Mirzasoleiman, Baharan
contents Deep neural networks often exploit *spurious* features that are present in the majority of examples within a class during training. This leads to *poor worst-group test accuracy*, i.e., poor accuracy for minority groups that lack these spurious features. Despite the growing body of recent efforts to address spurious correlations (SC), several challenging settings remain unexplored.In this work, we propose studying methods to mitigate SC in settings with: 1) spurious features that are learned more slowly, 2) a larger number of classes, and 3) a larger number of groups. We introduce two new datasets, Animals and SUN, to facilitate this study and conduct a systematic benchmarking of 8 state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods across a total of 5 vision datasets, training over 5,000 models. Through this, we highlight how existing group inference methods struggle in the presence of spurious features that are learned later in training. Additionally, we demonstrate how all existing methods struggle in settings with more groups and/or classes. Finally, we show the importance of careful model selection (hyperparameter tuning) in extracting optimal performance, especially in the more challenging settings we introduced, and propose more cost-efficient strategies for model selection. Overall, through extensive and systematic experiments, this work uncovers a suite of new challenges and opportunities for improving worst-group generalization in the presence of spurious features. Our datasets, methods and scripts available at https://github.com/BigML-CS-UCLA/SpuCo.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2306_11957
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Challenges and Opportunities in Improving Worst-Group Generalization in Presence of Spurious Features
Joshi, Siddharth
Yang, Yu
Xue, Yihao
Yang, Wenhan
Mirzasoleiman, Baharan
Machine Learning
Deep neural networks often exploit *spurious* features that are present in the majority of examples within a class during training. This leads to *poor worst-group test accuracy*, i.e., poor accuracy for minority groups that lack these spurious features. Despite the growing body of recent efforts to address spurious correlations (SC), several challenging settings remain unexplored.In this work, we propose studying methods to mitigate SC in settings with: 1) spurious features that are learned more slowly, 2) a larger number of classes, and 3) a larger number of groups. We introduce two new datasets, Animals and SUN, to facilitate this study and conduct a systematic benchmarking of 8 state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods across a total of 5 vision datasets, training over 5,000 models. Through this, we highlight how existing group inference methods struggle in the presence of spurious features that are learned later in training. Additionally, we demonstrate how all existing methods struggle in settings with more groups and/or classes. Finally, we show the importance of careful model selection (hyperparameter tuning) in extracting optimal performance, especially in the more challenging settings we introduced, and propose more cost-efficient strategies for model selection. Overall, through extensive and systematic experiments, this work uncovers a suite of new challenges and opportunities for improving worst-group generalization in the presence of spurious features. Our datasets, methods and scripts available at https://github.com/BigML-CS-UCLA/SpuCo.
title Challenges and Opportunities in Improving Worst-Group Generalization in Presence of Spurious Features
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11957