Superclass-Guided Representation Disentanglement for Spurious Correlation Mitigation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Chenruo, Liu, Hongjun, Lai, Zeyu, Shen, Yiqiu, Zhao, Chen, Lei, Qi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Liu, Chenruo
Liu, Hongjun
Lai, Zeyu
Shen, Yiqiu
Zhao, Chen
Lei, Qi
author_facet Liu, Chenruo
Liu, Hongjun
Lai, Zeyu
Shen, Yiqiu
Zhao, Chen
Lei, Qi
contents To enhance group robustness to spurious correlations, prior work often relies on auxiliary group annotations and assumes identical sets of groups across training and test domains. To overcome these limitations, we propose to leverage superclasses -- categories that lie higher in the semantic hierarchy than the task's actual labels -- as a more intrinsic signal than group labels for discerning spurious correlations. Our model incorporates superclass guidance from a pretrained vision-language model via gradient-based attention alignment, and then integrates feature disentanglement with a theoretically supported minimax-optimal feature-usage strategy. As a result, our approach attains robustness to more complex group structures and spurious correlations, without the need to annotate any training samples. Experiments across diverse domain generalization tasks show that our method significantly outperforms strong baselines and goes well beyond the vision-language model's guidance, with clear improvements in both quantitative metrics and qualitative visualizations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_08570
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Superclass-Guided Representation Disentanglement for Spurious Correlation Mitigation
Liu, Chenruo
Liu, Hongjun
Lai, Zeyu
Shen, Yiqiu
Zhao, Chen
Lei, Qi
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
To enhance group robustness to spurious correlations, prior work often relies on auxiliary group annotations and assumes identical sets of groups across training and test domains. To overcome these limitations, we propose to leverage superclasses -- categories that lie higher in the semantic hierarchy than the task's actual labels -- as a more intrinsic signal than group labels for discerning spurious correlations. Our model incorporates superclass guidance from a pretrained vision-language model via gradient-based attention alignment, and then integrates feature disentanglement with a theoretically supported minimax-optimal feature-usage strategy. As a result, our approach attains robustness to more complex group structures and spurious correlations, without the need to annotate any training samples. Experiments across diverse domain generalization tasks show that our method significantly outperforms strong baselines and goes well beyond the vision-language model's guidance, with clear improvements in both quantitative metrics and qualitative visualizations.
title Superclass-Guided Representation Disentanglement for Spurious Correlation Mitigation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08570