Year: 2024
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Deep neural classifiers tend to rely on spurious correlations between spurious attributes of inputs and targets to make predictions, which could jeopardize their generalization capability. Training classifiers robust to spurious correlations typically relies on annotations of spurious correlations in data, which are often expensive to get. In this paper, we tackle an annotation-free setting and propose a self-guided spurious correlation mitigation framework. Our framework automatically constructs fine-grained training labels tailored for a classifier obtained with empirical risk minimization to improve its robustness against spurious correlations. The fine-grained training labels are formulated with different prediction behaviors of the classifier identified in a novel spuriousness embedding space. We construct the space with automatically detected conceptual attributes and a novel spuriousness metric which measures how likely a class-attribute correlation is exploited for predictions. We demonstrate that training the classifier to distinguish different prediction behaviors reduces its reliance on spurious correlations without knowing them a priori and outperforms prior methods on five real-world datasets.
Authors: Guangtao Zheng, Wenqian Ye, Aidong Zhang
Institution: University of Virginia
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Funder: National Science Foundation
Awards: III: Medium: Collaborative Research: Mining and Leveraging Knowledge Hypercubes for Complex Applications, Collaborative Research: CCRI: New: A Scalable Hardware and Software Environment Enabling Secure Multi-party Learning, Collaborative Research: PPoSS: LARGE: Co-designing Hardware, Software, and Algorithms to Enable Extreme-Scale Machine Learning Systems, III: Small: Multimodal Machine Learning for Data with Incomplete Modalities, III: Medium: Knowledge-Guided Meta Learning for Multi-Omics Survival Analysis
OpenAlex ID: W4401024255
