Leveraging Text-to-Image Generation for Handling Spurious Correlation

Deep neural networks trained with Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) perform well when both training and test data come from the same domain, but they often fail to generalize to out-of-distribution samples. In image classification, these models may rely on spurious correlations that often exist between labels and irrelevant features of images, making predictions unreliable when those features do not exist. We propose a technique to generate training samples with text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models for addressing the spurious correlation problem. First, we compute the best describing token for the visual features pertaining to the causal components of samples by a textual inversion mechanism. Then, leveraging a language segmentation method and a diffusion model, we generate new samples by combining the causal component with the elements from other classes. We also meticulously prune the generated samples based on the prediction probabilities and attribution scores of the ERM model to ensure their correct composition for our objective. Finally, we retrain the ERM model on our augmented dataset. This process reduces the model's reliance on spurious correlations by learning from carefully crafted samples for in which this correlation does not exist. Our experiments show that across different benchmarks, our technique achieves better worst-group accuracy than the existing state-of-the-art methods.

Decompose-and-Compose: A Compositional Approach to Mitigating Spurious Correlation

While standard Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) training is proven effective for image classification on in-distribution data, it fails to perform well on out-of-distribution samples. One of the main sources of distribution shift for image classification is the compositional nature of images. Specifically, in addition to the main object or component(s) determining the label, some other image components usually exist, which may lead to the shift of input distribution between train and test environments. More importantly, these components may have spurious correlations with the label. To address this issue, we propose Decompose-and-Compose (DaC), which improves robustness to correlation shift by a compositional approach based on combining elements of images. Based on our observations, models trained with ERM usually highly attend to either the causal components or the components having a high spurious correlation with the label (especially in datapoints on which models have a high confidence). In fact, according to the amount of spurious correlation and the easiness of classification based on the causal or non-causal components, the model usually attends to one of these more (on samples with high confidence). Following this, we first try to identify the causal components of images using class activation maps of models trained with ERM. Afterward, we intervene on images by combining them and retraining the model on the augmented data, including the counterfactual ones. Along with its high interpretability, this work proposes a group-balancing method by intervening on images without requiring group labels or information regarding the spurious features during training. The method has an overall better worst group accuracy compared to previous methods with the same amount of supervision on the group labels in correlation shift.